昆明的天气 Kūnmíng de tiānqì — Kunming Weather

The Spring City, the plateau sun, and how Chinese grades things

Kunming sits at about 1,890 metres on the Yunnan plateau and has one of the most equable climates of any large city in the world. Monthly average temperatures run from roughly eight degrees in January to twenty in July, which is a narrower annual range than most places manage in a single month, and the nickname 春城 — Spring City — is a fair description rather than marketing. The reasons are latitude and altitude working against each other: it is as far south as Havana, which would make it tropical, and high enough to cancel most of that. What the altitude does not cancel is the sun. At two thousand metres the atmosphere filters far less ultraviolet, and the Yunnan and Tibetan plateaus produce sunburn at temperatures that feel mild — eighteen degrees and a light breeze, and an hour outside will burn a northern European. Chinese weather forecasts report 紫外线强度 as a matter of course, Chinese sun protection is thorough to a degree visitors find startling — sleeves, wide hats, face-covering visors, umbrellas in full sun — and the reason is partly medical and partly that pale skin is widely preferred, a preference the cosmetics industry works hard on. A visitor can ignore the aesthetics and should not ignore the UV. The other feature is the daily swing. 早晚温差 on the plateau runs to ten or fifteen degrees: cold at seven, hot at two, cold again by eight. The local habit is layers and a jacket carried regardless of how the morning looks, which is 林悦's 格外要带件外套. Low humidity makes all of it more comfortable than the same numbers in Shanghai — and it makes the cold feel less penetrating, which is the mirror image of lesson 60's complaint about the damp. On the grammar, a note about why this lesson exists. Learners arrive at HSK 4 with 很 doing the work of the entire intensifier system, and the result is a flat, oddly emphatic Chinese in which everything is very. The single most useful correction is to learn that 很 is the neutral setting rather than the strong one: 很好 means fine, 好 alone in answer to a question can sound curt, and if you actually mean very good you want 非常好 or 好极了. The second most useful is 有点儿 for anything mildly wrong and 比较 for anything mildly right, because between them they cover most of ordinary conversation without overstating. And 挺……的 or 蛮……的 will make you sound markedly more natural than 很 in speech — pick whichever matches where you are, which is 挺 in Beijing and 蛮 here.