My journo friend Stroppy Tom - who's been in China rather longer than me, though not always in Beijing - was opining a little while ago that he expected Beijing's sweltering summer weather to break around the middle of August, "as usual".
Now, my recollection is that the weather seldom breaks until the last week of August, and usually not until around the beginning of September. Certainly, my first 10 or 12 days here in 2002 were unpleasantly steamy. And I feel sure that most subsequent years have been much the same. However, there have been exceptions: in 2008, the city's 'usual' climate cycle was significantly deranged by frantic weather manipulation for the Olympics; and I noted around this time last year that our autumn appeared to have arrived a couple of weeks early.
For 5 or 6 of the last 9 years, I've managed to get away for a holiday in August - although I think I've always been back for the latter half of the month, and have had at least a few opportunities to rue the oppressive humidity here... before the joyous, magical transition to autumn (somehow, you can always tell when summer here is over - the temperatures may be just as hot as before, but you sense in your bones that that they're now going to start falling, almost day by day; and you know that the wretched humidity has gone for good [well, it usually gets a bit clammy for a while in mid-October as well, but that's cold humidity rather than hot]). So, I think I trust my own recollections on this; I think my mate Tom was mistaken, over-optimistic in his pronouncement on the "usual" weather pattern.
And yet... this year, it appears, he has proven to be bang on. I gather there were two or three days of heavy rain while I was away in Hubei last week... but then, Tuesday dawned with a bright blue sky, slightly lower temperature, and negligible humidity. And it's continued like that ever since (still just a little sticky at times; there's an oddly persistent pocket of humidity around the Sanlitun district; but it's not the stifling soupiness we've suffered through so much of the last three months). Autumn this year began on 16th August.
I hope that doesn't mean it's going to end early as well. This does seem almost too good to be true.
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Yes, it looks like we were a little premature in thinking that we might be free of the dratted humidity. There have been a few very sticky nights of late.
But the spooky thing is that it's been quite cool and clammy.
I thought when I first got back 10 days ago that Beijing was only seeming a little chilly to me because it presented such a sudden contrast with the temperatures I'd been enduring down in Hubei: well up in the 90s F most of the time, and on one occasion, I'm sure, getting up close to or above 100 F - the sort of heat that seems to suck the air out of your lungs, and leaves you feeling exhausted after just a few minutes' exposure.
But no, it's not just cooler than Hubei; it's really quite cool in absolute terms, unusually so for this time of year (it's still August, for gawd's sake!); it's almost getting nippy at night. There is the hint of an autumnal chill in the air already.
The last couple of days of clammy humidity felt like the sort of weather we usually get in mid-October.
I fear the usually gorgeous, best-time-of-the-year to be here September may pass us by this year.
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