Rushan Yintan sits on the Jiaodong peninsula, the arm of land on China’s east coast that reaches out between the Bohai Sea and the Yellow Sea. It has four seasons, and it has them on a schedule. Spring is March, April and May. Summer is June, July and August. Autumn is September, October and November. Winter is December, January and February. Three months each, no more and no less. Over the years I have lived here that schedule has not slipped by more than a week or two, which is not something you can say about many places.
That sounds like a small observation. It is the most useful thing in this chapter, because almost every confident statement made about Yintan comes from a single month of it. The people who say the place is damp came in late June. The people who say you will freeze came in January. The people who say it is a lovely, quiet seaside town came in May or September — which is true — and then they went home, and the town stopped being that.
So the honest way to describe the year is to walk through it. Twelve months, one at a time, in order. What follows is what the year actually did while I was standing in it.
January
January is the coldest month. There have been four winters since I moved here. The lowest reading I have taken on my own balcony was −13°C, in the winter of 2022, and −12°C in the winter after that. In the winter of 2024 I was away, further south. In the winter after that one I was here for December, gone for the middle of it, and back again in February. Being away is not the same as not knowing — I check the weather in this town every day, wherever I am, and have done since I arrived — and the four winters came in at about minus thirteen, minus twelve, minus ten, and a shade milder than that. Across all of them the trend has been upward rather than downward; the winters are getting milder, not harsher.
The heating question is the one people ask first, and the answer has changed since I arrived. At that time almost nothing out here had central heating; now a good number of compounds are connected to it, and more are added every year. Whether you use it is up to you. If you are young and can take it, an electric blanket under you and two quilts over you will get you through the winter at a cost you will not notice. If you cannot take it, pay the money and have the heating turned on. Both are reasonable. What is not reasonable is arriving in December with no plan for either.
It is worth saying plainly that Yintan in winter is not as cold as people imagine, because it is not as cold as the north-east of this country, and it is not as cold as Beijing, where I lived before. What makes it feel worse than it is, is the wind. The sea wind here is strong enough to pull the felt temperature several degrees below the real one. On a day that reads −13°C, standing outside you will feel something closer to −17°C or −18°C. People who have only lived inland do not have a category for this. They check the forecast, see a number they recognise, dress for that number, and then get hurt by the wind.
February
February is the second-coldest month. It is a degree or two warmer than January and colder than December, which is why it takes second place rather than last.
It is also, and more importantly, the emptiest month of the year. The Spring Festival falls either in the second half of January or the first half of February, and when it comes, the people who still live here go somewhere else. Some go back to the town they were born in. Some, particularly the older ones, go to their children’s apartments in cities and stay for a month. What is left is unusually quiet even by the standards of this place. The streets look bare, the beach looks bleak, and the sea, with nobody in front of it, looks emptier than the sea should.
If you are not planning to spend the winter here, my advice is to avoid January and February specifically, and go somewhere like Sanya or Xishuangbanna instead, where winter is genuinely pleasant. Come back in March. Do not come back in January to prove something to yourself; there is nobody here to prove it to.
March
March is still winter in everything but name. The heating season in Rushan runs from 20 November to 20 March, which means March is heated and therefore March is cold. It is early spring on the calendar, but it is not the spring that people from the south mean when they talk about spring. It does not warm up early and gently. It stays cold and then, fairly suddenly, it is April.
So if you are a person who suffers badly from cold, I would not come back in March either. There is a pattern among the older people who own flats here and live elsewhere most of the year: they come back after May Day. That is not sentimentality. That is a clear-eyed reading of the calendar.
April
April is when the temperature finally commits, and it is also when the trees do. If you are here in April you will see the trees outside your window open one after another, over about three weeks — peach, apricot, plum, pear, and a great many species I could not name. The magnolias here are unusually plentiful, in both red and white, and for a fortnight the whole coastline is doing something that no photograph of this place ever shows.
At home, the change shows up in the bedding. In March I slept under two thick quilts with an electric blanket underneath, because my flat has no heating. In April I took one quilt off and slept under a single thick one. If your flat does have heating, it stops anyway on 20 March, so April is the month you find out what your building is actually like.
May
May warms up properly. It stops being a month you dress defensively for, and the thick quilt is replaced by a thin one.
Two things happen on 1 May. The first is that tourists start arriving. It is not a flood; it is a slow rise. The seasonal residents come back as well, the retirees who keep a flat here and spend the winter somewhere warm, and most of them return from May Day onwards. So from 1 May the population of Yintan begins to climb — gradually, over three months, rather than all at once.
The second thing is the fishing ban. From 1 May to 1 September, large boats are not allowed out to fish. The seafood sold during those four months is not the same food at all; much of it has been frozen, and it tastes like it. This matters more than visitors expect, and it leads to the single most common disappointment in this town.
Which is this. Yintan’s oysters are at their best in winter. From November through April they are plump and firm and sweet, and after the water warms they are none of those things. In summer, the seafood on the barbecue stalls is often simply bad — not badly cooked, badly kept — and every year people eat it, decide they have been cheated, and write that Yintan’s seafood is a con. They were not cheated. They came in the wrong month. If seafood is the reason you are coming, come in winter. I have bought oysters here in winter for about one yuan each (roughly 15 US cents), and oysters that good do not exist at that price anywhere else I have lived.
June
June is the beginning of summer, and it is the best-kept secret of the year, because it is nothing like July.
It is warm without being hot and bright without being punishing. The sun on the beach in June will not burn you; it will colour you, which is what you wanted. If you do not mind cold water you can swim, though the sea is still on the cool side and will stay that way for a few more weeks. There are not many tourists yet and the whole place is quiet. May and June together are, to my taste, the most agreeable stretch of the year — they have the light of summer and the peace of autumn, and almost nobody books a holiday for them.
The wheat ripens in June. Around here it is cut on about 15 June, and for a week or so the land behind the town turns from green to bare in a way that tells you where you are.
Then, in the second half of the month, the rainy season starts. The wind swings round to the south and brings the sea’s moisture ashore with it, and this is when Yintan becomes humid.
A great deal has been written about the humidity, and almost all of it is written by people who were here between late June and early August. That stretch is genuinely humid — sticky, damp, towels that will not dry, sheets that feel wet at night. Outside that stretch, this place is dry, and it is drier than anywhere in the south I have been, including in winter. So the accurate sentence is: it is humid for about six weeks, and dry for the other ten and a half months. The inaccurate sentence, which is the one that circulates, is that the place is humid.
July
July is the hottest month and the fullest one. On 1 July the schools break up, and parents bring their children here to play in the water and dig in the sand. This is the only month in which you will see a lot of children in Yintan, and close to the only month in which you will see young people at all.
There is an obvious objection to that, and it is fair. There is a university in the east of Yintan — a vocational university with thousands of students — and during term time the eastern end of the strip is full of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. I have walked through it. But in July they go home for the summer holidays like everyone else’s children, and the town goes back to being what it is the rest of the year, which is a place where the people you pass on the street are mostly retired.
By tradition July is the hottest month, and it usually is. But the last few years have made the old rules less reliable. There is less rain than there used to be; the rainy season that always arrived on time now sometimes does not arrive at all, which is a change from what I was told when I moved here. This July, the first three weeks were not hot. Not mild — not hot. And the green algae that normally blows in with the summer current and coats the shallows in an unappetising soup never came, for the second summer running. Global weather has become difficult to predict, and this coast is not exempt from that.
August
August is the month the year turns. The hottest stretch here is normally 15 July to 15 August, and I would plan around that sentence rather than around the month.
The old calendar is still a good guide. Before the Start of Autumn, which falls in the first week of August, it is genuinely hot. After that date it drops a little. After 15 August it drops a little more, and by 25 August the heat is over. Anyone who tells you that the heat lasts all August has not been here in the second half of one.
The tourists leave on the same schedule. They are still numerous in the first twenty days, then they thin out, and by the end of the month they are gone — because the children have to go back to school, and the parents go with them, and in many cases the grandparents who came to help look after the children go too. The population drops by roughly two thirds in the space of a week. Then 1 September arrives, and the town is cool and empty and quiet again. It is the sharpest change of the year, and it happens faster than you would believe.
September
September is the most comfortable month. Autumn here is three months long — September, October, November — and September is the one I would choose if I could only keep one.
It steps down out of the August heat rather than falling out of it. You can still wear shorts and sandals and wade at the edge of the water; swimming needs a little more thought, because the sea has cooled a long way from July and August. People who feel the cold should stay on the sand.
Two things happen on 1 September. The first is school, which empties the town as described above. The second is the opening of the fishing season, and it is celebrated properly. There is a large ceremony at Rushankou harbour, and on this side of the bay a smaller version of it at Nanhong pier, and it is one of the few genuinely crowded mornings Yintan has all year. Once the boats are out, the small ones come back quickly with the first catch of the season; the large ones stay out for days. From that week on, the fish in the market is real fish again.
The same date brings the university’s new intake. It takes in more than ten thousand first-year students a year, and in early September the eastern end of the strip is full of them and their families. This gives you a choice that most people do not realise they have: if you live in the east, you get some of that energy, and if you live in the west, you will not see a young person under forty for months, because the west is where the retirees cluster. If you want the students around, live in the east. You can even eat in the university canteen, which is cheap and unpretentious and always busy.
The eastern beach in front of the university is also where people go to forage at low tide — digging clams and prying oysters off the rocks. Go with the tide table, wear shoes you do not care about, and take a bucket. It is one of the few free things left anywhere.
October
October is when you start dressing again. Shorts and sandals stop being enough at the shoulder ends of the day, and by the middle of the month you want a jacket, especially in the morning and evening, when the temperature drops further than you expect. At night a thin quilt goes back on the bed.
The leaves hold on until the second half of the month. In early October most trees are still green; the turn happens somewhere in the middle of the month and the yellowing is at its best in the last week or so. Walking under them is worth an evening.
The National Day holiday on 1 October brings a small wave of visitors, and on 7 October they go home, and the town becomes quiet again in a single day. After that, commercial life in Yintan essentially stops. The stalls that fill the night market through the summer do not come back out, because it is too cold to sit outdoors eating skewers and there are not enough tourists left to make it worth their while. The marine park out on the point closes after National Day and does not reopen until 1 May next year. Whole sectors of the local economy shut down for seven months, and nobody finds this remarkable except visitors.
November
November is the tail of autumn. The leaves go from yellow to gone. The first half of the month is comfortable enough; in the second half, if the weather turns extreme, it will snow — not a deep snow, but the first proper sign of what is coming. The wardrobe changes over: coats, trousers, closed shoes. Swimming in the sea is over, except for the small group of older people who swim through the winter regardless of the temperature, and who seem to enjoy it.
And this is the month when the sea becomes the best thing about living here. It is worth explaining why, because summer visitors never see this. In summer the sea is, honestly, not attractive. The wind comes from the south and stirs the sediment off the seabed, and there are hundreds of people in the water churning it further, and the result is water that is cloudy and dull and reminds you of a swimming pool nobody has cleaned. Then autumn arrives. The tourists go, the swimmers go, the wind swings round to the north, and quite suddenly the water is clear and still and a deep, dark green — the colour of jade, or of good turquoise. I have stood on the beach in November and looked at water that could have been somewhere expensive, and been the only person looking at it.
December
December is two different months wearing one name. The first half is not especially cold. The second half is very cold and stays that way.
It is also when the winter residents finally leave. The older people who kept the town populated through the autumn give up and go south, to Hainan or to Yunnan, and in December Yintan becomes the thing that people elsewhere call it: a ghost town. When people use that word about this place, they mean these three months — December, January, February — and they are not wrong to.
But the word is becoming less accurate than it was, for one reason: heating. In recent years a lot of work went into connecting more compounds to the district heating network, and the number of buildings that have it keeps growing. Where it is done, people stay. There is one compound I know of, close to the heating station, where the conversion was done early and well, and the service afterwards was good, and the result is that a substantial number of its owners spent last winter here rather than leaving, with indoor temperatures around 20°C. That is not a ghost town. That is just a small town in winter.
December also gives you the best sunrise and sunset of the year, and this is a thing I did not understand until I had lived through a year here. The sun moves. In winter, and especially around the winter solstice, it sits at its southernmost point, which means it rises out of the sea and sets into the sea, and you can stand on the beach and watch it do both on the same day. The light lies across the water in a long road of gold. In summer the sun is at its northernmost and goes down over the land, and the sea gets neither a proper sunrise nor a proper sunset for months. So if you are coming here hoping to photograph the sea at dawn and dusk, come in winter. Everybody comes in summer, and there is nothing to see.
The dry weather is the other thing winter gives you. Autumn and winter are the seasons when it hardly rains at all. It is cold outside, and with heating it is comfortable inside, and without heating it is still comfortable on the balcony, because the sun comes in. I spent a great deal of that first winter sitting on my balcony in a coat with a cup of tea, which sounds like a small pleasure and is not. This is one of the genuine advantages of living in the north of China: there are a great many clear days, the sun is visible for most of them, the air is dry rather than damp, and in winter the light comes far enough into a room to reach the bed.
Outside, though, the wind is still the wind. I walked down to the sea a few times a week to take photographs, and the day after any snow I went immediately, because snow on that beach is worth the walk. But the cold on an exposed shore is hard on the hands: you take a glove off for a minute to work the camera and your fingers stiffen, and your face goes numb, and you put the camera away sooner than you wanted to. It is the clearest lesson the season teaches. The number on the forecast is not what you will feel.
The year, laid flat
Twelve months, in order, and the thing that stands out is how few of the complaints survive a full turn of the calendar. The humidity lasts six weeks and is then gone for ten and a half months. The cold is real for three months and milder than Beijing — the wind is the part that hurts, and the wind is not a temperature. There is no heating in most buildings, and that is a problem with a solution, not a reason to live elsewhere. The town is full for about seven weeks a year, which is the actual content of the word “ghost town”.
None of this is difficult. It simply has a schedule, and the schedule does not negotiate: the oysters are good from November to April, the sea is at its clearest in autumn, the sunrises and sunsets are complete around the winter solstice, the trees open in April, the wheat comes off on 15 June, the visitors arrive on 1 July and leave in the last ten days of August, the heating comes on 20 November and goes off on 20 March. To live here for a year you do not need courage, or money, or a temperament suited to isolation. You need a calendar, and the willingness to read it.