Even with the promise of spring around the corner, and the cold weather forecast for the coming week in northern China, now it is the time to reflect on the fun we had in the by gone winter time.

"Let's meet at the Great Wall the day the first snow arrives," Xu Gang, owner of a small IT company, told his friends when winter arrived a few months ago.

So, they drove to Jian Kou, the part of the Great Wall with the most pristine surroundings in suburban Beijing, last December.

There they barbecued fish from nearby rivers and drank Erguotou, a strong spirit made locally, inside warm houses of local farmers while watching snowflakes do their wind-blown dance outside the windows.

At 4:00 AM the next morning, they climbed cautiously onto the dilapidated wall and waited for the first sunbeams to light up the silver "dragon" in the dark landscape.

But Erguotou is not the right drink to go with snow, according to artist Shen Yu.

It should be the yellow wine, preferably Nuerhong a rice wine that southerners traditionally bury beside a sweet osmanthus tree when a daughter is born and dig out for her wedding banquet, he said.

The artist dated a girl at a Shaoxing-food restaurant beside Houhai Lake in Beijing's old district when it snowed. Sipping yellow wine from blue-and-white ceramic cups, they watched snow slowly cover the icy lake, the golden roofs of the Forbidden City and the tops of its red walls.

At the time willows are turning green beside West Lake in Hangzhou, hometown of Nuerhong, local resident Zhang Yun said she will always remember the fragrance of red plums in the white snow.

The only snow in the millennia-old city in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River happened to fall on a Saturday morning this month. With her husband, parents and grandparents, Zhang headed for the Broken Bridge on the eastern end of the 1,200-year-old Bai Causeway crossing West Lake.

They expected to see the melting snow on the Broken Bridge, one of the 10 attractions of West Lake that were recorded in documents as early as the Southern Song Dynasty (AD1127-1279), whose capital was Hangzhou before it was conquered by Mongolians in AD 1276.

They never reached the bridge. With people rushing from every corner of the city to the small bridge, cars lined up for half a kilometre, creating a huge traffic jam.

"Actually, we could hardly see the bridge; crowds packed the Bai Causeway and the lakeshore, holding umbrellas of various colours," Zhang said.

Zhang and her family changed their destination as they joined the crowd heading for Solitary Hill, the largest natural island within the West Lake, which is connected to the bank by the 900-year-old, 2.6-kilometre Su Causeway.

Red plums had just started to blossom on Solitary Hill but about 20,000 people swarmed to the 0.22 square-kilometre island that day to see them.

Compared with Hangzhou residents seeking aesthetic delights, people in Nanjing, a two-millennium-old capital also in the Yangtze River Delta, were more enthusiastic about the culinary delights brought by the snow. "Clams get most delicious after it snows," said Wang Aiqing, a housewife in Nanjing.

Fished from nearby fresh waters, clams are boiled with salted meat, bean curd and green vegetables in an earthenware pot, until they become thoroughly soft.

Nanjing residents reportedly ate more than 10 tons of clams the first week after it snowed at the beginning of this month. "Spring also brings many delicacies, such as fresh bamboo shoots, but nothing can compare with after-snow clams,

"Who knows whether it will snow in the coming winter?" Wang said. "I may have to wait for years for the next great clam soup."

In Shanghai, the only snowfall this winter lasted no more than one hour last month, and local residents could hardly have fun.

"Seeing mums and dads queuing to buy large bags of vegetables was the only memory of the snow," said Chen Li, a 28-year-old office worker. "They were afraid that the prices of vegetables would go up the next morning."

(China Daily February 27, 2006)