THIS is the very best time to be in Beijing. The skies are blue, the sultry heat of the monsoon summer has gone.
During the day the air is still and warm. The nights are cool and the hum of a million Hitachi air conditioners no longer vibrates through the darkness.
"When you get days like this, get in your car and drive, in any direction," said a diplomat who has lived here for many years. So we did, last weekend, making up for the long weeks of smoggy weather by drinking in the mountain air and the views.
But in Beijing itself the sunny weather has brought the city a Mediterranean like feel. What makes it so special this year is the proliferation of pavement cafes, which have become all the rage in a city where restaurants, indoors or outdoors, have always been places to have meals rather than to relax.
One district called Sanlitun in the eastern part of town has become an oriental slice of Paris. Dozens of pavement cafes and bars have appeared in its narrow, tree lined roads, offering cappuchino and espressos, chocolate croissants and doughnuts on shaded streets beside wickerwork shops and antique stores and delicatessens. They have non Chinese names, such as Bella, Public Space, Petite Bakery, Studio 5, Cale Cafe and Jazz-ya. Customers at Petite Bakery are welcomed by a chorus of "Huanying, Huanying!" ("Welcome, welcome!") from the female staff and handed a tray and tongs to pick fresh French pastries from the shelves.
Some of the cafes have been established for over a year. The owner of Cafe Cafe, Ju Lao, who is 27, said she opened it with her brother in 1995 after seven years working in Norway. Beside Petite Bakery a wall was erected on a miniature building site and faced with smart red brick tiles in the space of the last two weeks as another cafe took shape.
Other returned Chinese have got in on the act, like Henry Lee from Shanghai who spent 10 years working in top hotels in Australia before opening Public Space earlier this year. The outdoor cafes were designed to attract a clientele from the fast growing foreign community, many of them based in nearby diplomatic compounds, and indeed any time of day or night the roads in Sanlitun are lined with cars bearing the black number plates of non Chinese residents.
The almost routine grumbling of foreigners about the travails of life in China somehow seems to carry less conviction than usual on the pavements of Sanlitun on a brilliantly sunny September morning. The place is catching on too with the Chinese, who have no tradition of coffee breaks. "The new businessmen and the couple with two jobs and no children, and the artists, they like to come here sometimes," said a regular customer of the Petite Bakery.
"You could call them our Chinese yuppies."
More and more Beijing young people are turning up at the cafe tables half hidden from the roadway behind vast arrays of flowering potted plants and miniature palm trees, and whiling away an hour or so over coffee and pastry or a late night pasta, many chatting incessantly on mobile phones.
"Enjoy it while you can, for soon the winter winds and the dust storms will come," said a long term resident. After a very short in between season, northern China has long, cold winters when they say the air turns so dry that it fills with static electricity and so dusty that people have to tape up their windows. But there are still a few short weeks to linger over espresso and stock up on memories of the Beijing autumn.