The wind in Zhengzhou has not carried any coolness for a long time.
At noon, stepping outside feels less like walking down a street than pushing through a city that has been roasted. The paving stones seem to smoke underfoot. Leaves hang limp. Clouds have been vaporized by the sun, and even shadows seem unwilling to fall.
The forecast for the next seven days keeps the high between 39 and 42°C. The low stays above 29°C; one night will not drop below 33°C. With humidity above 60 percent, the city becomes a boiling pot—steamed by day, stewed by night.
The heat makes it hard to breathe. It also brought back a piece of history I had read before.
In the summer of 1743, the eighth year of the Qianlong reign, the Central Plains sweltered under temperatures that reached 44.4°C. There was no air conditioning, no refrigerator, not even an electric fan. People got through the stifling nights with palm-leaf fans and well water.
The records are stark. The heat steamed the air and withered the plants. Earth and stone were scorched; gold ran from the mastheads; lead and tin melted; even thick walls in deep shade burned like fire. Within a few days, more than ten thousand people died from the heat. The Qianlong emperor ordered granaries opened and medicine distributed. Shade shelters were set up, herbal decoctions handed out, and relief provided. It was the first officially recorded high-temperature disaster relief effort in Chinese history.
In the Central Plains then, there must also have been the drone of cicadas and moving shadows, people sitting on stone steps fanning their backs, someone holding a bowl of mung bean soup at dusk—not only for coolness, but for the hope of staying alive.
Three hundred years later, we have air conditioning, sunscreen, iced watermelon, and sun-protective clothing. Yet when a heatwave arrives, that sense of being trapped with nowhere to run has not really changed.
Some say this kind of heat is part of a natural cycle, like a tide: it rose in Qianlong's time, and now the sky has simply blown another whistle. Others say we have lit this heat ourselves. Since industrialization, carbon emissions have climbed, and the planet's thermometer has risen year after year. Cities have grown denser, green space has shrunk, and concrete and steel have become cages for heat. The cool breeze of a summer night now has to be simulated by an air conditioner.
I do not know who is more right. But I know this will not be the last hot summer.
In the evening, I opened the door and was met not by cool air but by heat stored up all day. Outside the window, the sunset was thick as an oil painting, hot enough to burn a hole in the sky.
Then a question came to me: are we becoming less tolerant of heat?
As a child, my home had no air conditioning and no electric fan. We got through summer with a fan, and I envied friends whose homes had electric fans. Now the air conditioner has to run all night before I can sleep well. It is easy to move from frugality to luxury and hard to move back. We have become dependent on these cool inventions.
But nature has never intended for us to forget its power.
The heat of 1743 is in the history books; the heat of 2025 is written on our skin and in our social feeds.
Maybe there is something to learn from that history—not how to endure heat better, but how to feel awe, how to practice restraint, and how not to keep testing nature's limits just because we have technology.
The summer is still long. The wind may not turn cool. But keep a little clarity: none of this is without cause, and none of it is without a way out.