Historic Shanghai

Shanghai’s climate is notorious for its steamy summers, bone-chilling winters and the uncomfortable “Plum Rains” every June. One thing it is not known for is snow, of which it gets very little. When it snows in Shanghai, it is a big deal. Children irk their teachers by running to the windows to take a look. Stock market crises take page two, bumped by splashy headlines about what usually amounts to a dusting of the white stuff. And traffic – on the best of days a free-for-all – becomes all-out chaos.

The four straight days of snow we experienced from 26-29 January 2008 qualified as a once-a-century event, and deserved the headlines that it precipitated. Records of Shanghai’s weather since the mid-1800s are surprisingly complete, in part because of the good work of the scholarly Jesuit fathers at the Siccawei Observatory, whose weather reports were transmitted by telegraph to the Bund, where semaphores were hoisted at the Gutzlaff Tower to inform ships at anchor in the Whangpoo of impending conditions. And in the Shanghai Municipal Council’s annual work report, a summary of each day’s weather was published in an exceedingly clever one-page chart, like this one:

Each day was divided into four quadrants, representing the hours 6:00 am to 6:00 pm in three-hour periods. A circle represented dry weather; the letter “R” rain; “F” for frost; and “S” for snow. Thus we know that in 1920, it snowed in Shanghai on February 2 and 21, and again on March 2 – but just briefly. And if it was like most of our experiences in the last several decades, it probably didn’t “stick” for very long, if at all. So “The Great Snow of 2008” (pictured below) deserves its place in our memories – and in Shanghai history.