Everyone knows Chinese summers are hot. Fewer people know how completely the country empties of comfortable places: in May, 255 of the 359 cities we track sit in a pleasant band; in July, that number falls to 27.
What we measured
We hold monthly climate normals for 359 Chinese cities — 4,308 data points covering temperature, rainfall and humidity for 2021 to 2025. For each city we defined "comfortable" as a mean temperature between 10 and 26°C with rainfall below 75% of that city's wettest month. That second condition is the one that matters: a mild month that happens to be the rainy season is not a month you want to walk a city in.
The months, ranked by how much of the country works
May 255 · October 250 · April 242 · September 214 · March 192 · November 173 · June 119 · February 59 · December 56 · January 53 · August 45 · July 27.
The shape is not symmetric. Spring and autumn are wide open — almost the entire country qualifies. July and August are not "hotter versions of May"; they are a different country.
What July actually leaves you
The 27 cities that pass in July are not the ones on the postcards. They are places at altitude, on the northern edge, or in the mountains of the southwest: Lishui at 26.0°C, Tongren at 25.7°C, Hanzhong at 25.3°C, Alashan at 25.6°C with 20mm of rain for the month, Altay at 25.4°C with 14mm. Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are nowhere near the list.
That is the useful part. "China is hot in July" is a sentence that tells a traveller nothing. "27 of 359 cities are comfortable in July, and here they are" tells them where to go.
And January inverts it
January leaves 53 cities, and almost all of them are on one coastline: Qionghai at 20.2°C, Wanning at 19.7°C, Dongfang at 19.1°C, Sanya at 18.9°C, Haikou at 18.7°C, plus Zhuhai, Beihai and Zhanjiang on the Guangdong and Guangxi coast. In winter the comfortable part of China is a strip about 200km wide in the south.
Why we publish this
Climate data for China is easy to find per city and almost impossible to compare across cities, because every source uses different normals and different definitions. Holding one dataset of 359 cities on one set of five years makes questions like "where should I go in July" answerable rather than guessable.
The full set is free to browse, no signup and no email wall: sinostay.com.
The working note with the full numbers and our method is at sinostay.com/journal/3.html.
Top comments (1)
the month is half the trip decision and most people only find that out after they booked. framing the choice around when a place actually works is more useful than another city list