Located in the northeastern corner of China, Beijing is roughly at the same latitude as New York City. It is a large metropolis with over 3000 years of history. Beijing was the capital of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties and from here 34 emperors ruled China. A long history has left famous historical sites of great aesthetic and cultural interest. Ahead of the 2008 Olympics, the capital is racing to complete an array of new and improved facilities in the metropolis, which will combine modern skyscrapers with historical architecture, to distinguish itself from other cities of world fame.

Sandstorms in China

In 2005, a Nature paper examined China’s changing environment. Partially worsened by human actions such as overgrazing and grassland degradation, dust storms began to increase in the 20th century. Between AD 300 and 1949, northwestern China saw a dust storm on average every 31 years. After 1990, the average jumped to one such storm per year. According to news reports, at the time this storm hit, the average rate of dust storms for the Beijing region (in northeastern China) was five or six a year. This storm was the eighth to hit the region in 2006.
(from http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17249)

Sandstorms have been a problem for centuries in Beijing, which is shielded from the encroaching desert only by a range of mountains to the north-west. But industrialisation, over-extraction of water from aquifers and rivers, and over-ambitious attempts to develop agriculture in the north-west of the country have hugely increased the size of the country's deserts. Repeated attempts to hold back the tide of sand have involved the planting of more than 40 billion trees across northern China. But environmentalists have warned that many have died, and while those that survived may have shielded the capital from the worst of the sand in the last five years, they may have drained more water from the soil, making things worse in the long run. (from Telegraph.co.uk. April 18, 2006)