Xia Da Xue! Pics From First Snow of the Season



Unless you managed to sleep through all of Sunday (November 1), you would have woken yesterday to a thick layer of snow blanketing Beijing. When I stumbled out of bed around 6am to – ahem – take a pee, I was shocked to see the park outside my window lightly dusted in white.

Given that it’s not even winter yet, I assumed it was either frost or my eyes clouding over from the shock of being open at 6am, so I returned to bed and thought no more about it. Re-emerging from under my doona many hours later, this is the sight that greeted me outside.

There was no doubt about it – it was snowing, and heavy falls continued into the early afternoon. According to Xinhua, Shandong, Jilin and Shaanxi Provinces, as well as Tianjin and Beijing Municipalities were affected. “Provinces in the northwest, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the north, Shanghai and Jiangsu Province in the east also reported a drastic drop of temperature.”

The early fall wasn’t entirely a freak of nature however. Xinhau reported:

“Beijing Weather Modification Office said they had used artificial means to increase the snow to ease the lingering drought. ‘We wont miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from the lingering drought,’ said Zhang Qiang, who is in charge of the office. Zhang said more than 16 million tonnes of snow had been artificially added according to the preliminary calculation. ‘We have used a total of 186 doses of silver iodide since 8:00p.m. on Saturday,’ she said.”

Although the sun was shining from a stunningly clear blue sky this morning, the chilly air ensured much of the snow was still lying on the ground. It's unlikely to stick around for long, however. The BBC is predicting (relatively) warmer temperatures and clear skies for the rest of the week.

Here are some snaps of the scenes around Chunxiu Lu (near the Workers Stadium) and Guozijian (near the Lama Temple) around midday on Sunday.

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Looks fine here. Are you on an old version of Windows?

Register and post your own events on the beijinger website.

The upload has resized some of the images and makes them look warped... one for your techies.

Let's have that again! Biggrin

Love that snow from yesterday

this is Angie