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China Braces for Blistering Cold This Week

A worker installs light bulbs decoration on snow covered trees along a street for the upcoming Christmas festival and year-end season in Beijing, Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023. (AP)
A worker installs light bulbs decoration on snow covered trees along a street for the upcoming Christmas festival and year-end season in Beijing, Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023. (AP)
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China Braces for Blistering Cold This Week

A worker installs light bulbs decoration on snow covered trees along a street for the upcoming Christmas festival and year-end season in Beijing, Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023. (AP)
A worker installs light bulbs decoration on snow covered trees along a street for the upcoming Christmas festival and year-end season in Beijing, Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023. (AP)

Chinese authorities warned on Tuesday of heavy snowfall, blizzards and plunging temperatures this week in most parts of the country in what could be one of the coldest December snaps in China in decades.

Beijing is expected to be hit by temperatures as low as minus 18 Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit) this weekend compared to around minus 8C (17.6F) on average in mid-December. Even Shanghai in the south could be buffeted by weather as frigid as minus 4C (24.8F) on Saturday through Sunday, unusual for this time of the year.

Parts of north, northwest and south China, as well as parts of the Inner Mongolia region, Guizhou province and even regions south of the Yangtze River, could see temperatures slide by more than 14 degrees Celsius, the National Meteorological Center (NMC) cautioned.

It has called on local governments to take precautions against the cold weather, advised the public to keep warm, and urged measures to be taken to protect tropical crops and aquatic produce.

Many rivers in Heilongjiang, a vast northeastern province that shares a border with Russia, have already frozen over.

Also on Tuesday, the China Meteorological Administration activated a Level-II emergency response - its second-highest emergency response level - for the cold wave and blizzards.

In Beijing, more than 6,000 people have been put on call for any road emergency rescues and 2,200 sets of snow-removal equipment and machinery are on standby for deployment.

Additionally, 32,000 tons of snow-thawing agent is ready for use on icy roads and motorways.

The Chinese capital last saw such cold weather on Jan. 7, 2021, when the temperature fell to minus 19.6C (minus 3.3F).

The cold snap in Beijing this week, compared with the autumn-like conditions a week ago, reflects the sharp oscillations in temperatures recently. In October, Beijing experienced one of its warmest Octobers in decades in a year of weather extremes.

Beijing's all-time low temperature was minus 27.4°C (minus 17.3F), set on Feb. 22, 1966. (Reporting by Ryan Woo Editing by Frances Kerry)

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Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
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Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)

A new exhibition featuring artwork and poems from contemporary artists and former patients will go on show at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem, in London, the Guardian newspaper said on Monday.

The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalizingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions – tears, terror, ecstasy, despair – caused not by real events, but by the brain’s activity between sleeping and waking.

“Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists,” the newspaper wrote.

Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital.

The exhibit includes paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, who spent eight months as a patient at the Maudsley after a breakdown when her four children were aged between two and nine.

She created dozens of paintings while there, and held her first exhibition which sold out. “I couldn’t talk about my problems, but I could paint them,” she said later.

Two of Johnson Wahl’s paintings are included in the exhibition, Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions, which opens at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in August.

The centerpiece of the show is a huge installation, Night Tides, by contemporary artist Kate McDonnell. She uses swathes of bedding woven with disordered words to evoke the restlessness and clashing thoughts of insomnia.

According to Caroline Horton, professor of sleep and cognition and director of DrEAMSLab at Bishop Grosseteste university in Lincoln, “dreaming occurs during sleep, and sleep is essential for all aspects of mental and physical health.

Among other works featured in the exhibition is London’s Overthrow by Jonathan Martin, an arsonist held in the “criminal lunatic department” of Bethlem hospital from 1829 until his death in 1838. In 2012, the Guardian described it as a “mad pen-and-ink depiction of the capital’s destruction due to godlessness”.