Author: Lou Hsienhua

In the early autumn of Beijing in 2017, I explored many beautiful and picturesque old hutongs and as a southerner, I found it delighting to see greenish pine trees lining beside the traditional resident houses in the city. Embracing the scorching sun, the city of Beijing is coming off as both youthful, vigorous and also vividly reflective of China’s long and complicated history.

2017, Autumn in Beijing. These traditional brick-built houses were located in Beijing’s artist district in the northeast, with many modern art galleries and exhibitions open for tourists to visit. Featuring China’s classic 70s and 80s proletariat spirits, the area’s brick-built houses were remindful of a time when people tended to live together for the most of time and prefer co-habitative living environment.

Wuhan 2016, summer. The koi flags or koinobori hung on the roof of a shop outside a private business college in southern Wuhan; that was a time when the city was on the wake of a series of urban renovation projects or gentrification processes that later saw the completion of city’s expensive yet very expansive Metro system and later, the only BRT system on Xiongchu Avenue. At that time, college students in Wuhan often clustered in the so-called Optics Valley Square to kill time by hanging out around nearby shopping centers. That was a time of constant change and perhaps, in other words, a period of transformative changes happening all at once.

2024 July at Hong Kong’s PolyU. There in the Contonese speaking city, your would rarely need a jacket or coat from April to November until you get indoors or take MTR, the city’s public transit system, where temperatures could get pretty low thanks to the city’s effective air conditioning system. There is an entire floor in the library that opens 24 hours a day for self study except for extreme weather conditions such as typhoon or heavy rainfalls. If not because of financial restrictions, I would have wished to be staying in Hong Kong as long as possible; among the locations I love to visit in the city, PolyU’s library stands out because of its widely accessible wireless network and beautiful view of the Victoria Harbour.

Qianjiang, 2024, summer. The small city is located in the southern part of Hubei, on the southern bank of the Han River. Heatwaves approaches the city this year, with recordbreaking high temperatures that lasted until late November and the rain was getting particularly scarce and precious this summer perhaps due to climate change. The inland city is known for its delicate lobster cuisine that was initially originated from a small township named Wuqi in the Jianghan Oilfield in the northwestern part of the city.