Mohe, China’s northernmost city, recorded a temperature of minus 63.4 degrees Fahrenheit this week. That was the coldest in its recorded history, and cold enough to cause hypothermia within minutes in anyone who wasn’t dressed properly.
“It has never been this cold,” Zhang Hong, 53, who runs a pancake shop in Mohe and has lived in the city for 30 years, said by phone on Friday.
“It was so frosty outside,” she added. “The wind was so brisk that it felt as though it was shaving your nose and face.”
As arctic winds and snow whipped across Siberia and into China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula this week, Ms. Zhang was one of hundreds of millions of people across East Asia who suffered. Noses and fingers turned red. Plane and train journeys were delayed or canceled. And the extreme cold put a damper on the Lunar New Year, the most important holiday of the year for many people in the region.
[Having been in a few of their stingily insulated houses while spending a winter in drafty barracks on mainland Japan during one exceptionally cold winter, I feel for them. ~ Beege]
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