In Beijing, you don’t need a calendar to know it is the first week of October. The trees tell the story quite well as their leaves change from shades of green to the bright vibrant shades of orange, red and yellow. The season progresses and the leaves fall to the ground one by one, overlapping, rotting and vanishing.

It seems that poets don’t like autumn much. But they are quite interesting to make it a sad and sorrowful season, apart from an English poet-Keats, of course, in his poem Ode to Autumn “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”: so much more positive than whining about the death of the year and the love that now grows old and the leaves that lie like a body, and all those other negative metaphors which autumn seems to provoke. And therefore, what the season of Beijing brings to us is not a heartbroken song, but a heart-stoppingly gorgeous and colorful masterpiece.

There is something triumphant about it: it should be a grand finale to the year, like the last crashing chords of a symphony or the closing number of a musical. If you think these metaphors sound fanciful, that is because the reality of a Beijing autumn defies mere words. If you stand on the top of the Xiang Mountain, what catches your eyes is the ocean of crimson, waving with the wind. Photography is the only art form which can cope with the wave upon wave of texture and color and contrast which rise like a kind of arboreal aurora across these hills and mountains beneath a cobalt-blue sky. You find yourself struggling for adjectives. Copper, henna, russet: they seem too twee, too inadequate. You try describing the tint of tuning birch leaves. Fulvous cocktail, perhaps. No, it sounds too pretentious. You keep coming back to the basics: scarlet, yellow, orange. And you keep repeating the same gobsmacked (utterly astonished), infantile response. However, it seems that is not exact. You can almost smell the fragrance, like the sweet-smelling of eau de cologne, or the aromatic wine flying around. Wow, wow, wow.

But it is not enough. No, no. It should be more. I am looking forward to an in-your-face, glorious-technicolor, wide-screen celebration of autumn. There is no month in the whole year, in which nature wears a more beautiful appearance than in the month of October. Spring has many beauties in Beijing, and May is a fresh and blooming month, whereas the charm of this time of year is enhanced by their contrast with the winter season. October has no such advantage. It comes when we remember nothing but clear skies, green field and sweet-smelling flowers-when the recollection of the snow, and ice, and bleak winds, has faded from our minds as completely as they has disappeared from the earth- and yet what a pleasant time it is!

Orchards and corn-fields ring with the hum of labor; trees bend beneath the thick clusters of rich fruit which bow their branches to the ground; and the corn, piled in graceful sheaves, or waving in every light breath that sweeps above it, as if it wooed the sickle, tinges the landscape with a golden hue. You can listen, and listen silently. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither. And you can see, seeing directly. A faint flame trembled on a contadina’s cheek, and her sickle kissing the wheat slightly and mildly. A mellow softness appears to hang over the whole earth; the influence of the season seems to extend itself to the very waggon, whose slow motion across the well-reaped field is perceptible only to the eye, but strikes with no harsh sound upon the ear. And you will see an angel’s smile blooming on the woman’s face.

When the autumn begins her trip, Beijing returns back to tranquility, including the light, the shadow and the colors. Like a glass of sugar water, the substances go down to the bottom, calm. And the sweetest is the dream.