Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
healthy” to “hazardous” by U.S. standards. Spring used to be notorious for its dust storms,
which would taint the sky with a toxic yellow color. These do still occur every year, but
with decreased frequency and intensity. The Chinese government is trying to take action to
reduce the problem—such as limiting traffic, moving factories away from the city, cloud
seeding, and tree planting—but the problem sometimes seems unrelenting.
There are 27 official monitoring stations scattered around the municipality collecting
readings to produce the Air Pollution Index (API), and if you watch these on a daily basis,
you can see that pollution levels swing greatly from day to day and place to place. Gener-
ally, the areas of Beijing that fall into the more polluted end of the scale most often include
Shijingshan district (central west), Daxing county (south), and Yanqing county (far northw-
est). Miyun district (far northeast, and the place of Beijing's water reservoir), on the other
hand, is almost always the least polluted. The inner city and Shunyi district typically fall
somewhere around the middle.
Pollution is an ever-present problem in Beijing.
Over the last year or so pollution monitoring systems in China have become a conten-
tious issue, largely provoked by the American embassies in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guang-
zhou, which set up their own equipment within their own grounds and measured the im-
mediately surrounding pollution according to standards set by the U.S. Environmental Pro-
