After all these blog posts on the awful air quality here, questions about China's economy and efforts at soft power, tensions with North Korea, and the rest of that sort of thing, my thoughts yesterday took a simpler turn.

It was a beautiful afternoon in Beijing. Make that a gorgeous day.

A series of late-summer rains had brushed away the grime. There were blue skies and sunshine. Pollution readings stayed blessedly low. A light wind rustled the leaves in our courtyard. 

It was an afternoon made for sitting still and watching the world move by.

I've recently been reading "Six Records of a Floating Life," a slim, beautiful and sorrowful volume written by an unimportant man named Shen Fu whose life straddled the turn from 18th to 19th Century China. It reminded me a good deal of a biography of the essayist Zhang Dai, who lived a century before (written by historian Jonathan Spence and subtitled: "Memories of a Late Ming Man").

The stories of both men involved wretched personal ruin -- Zhang wandering and alone in the mid-1600s, Shen broke and widowed in the early-1800s -- but they also included meditations on small, beautiful things. There were ghostly lanterns stretched across the mountains, poetry recited on boats floating beneath the moonlight, and much conversation about the most sublime of teas.

One might see such flourishes as Orientalist fetish, a turn away from the economic progress here that's lifted hundreds of millions from poverty. But to read of robes rustling across the garden on a quiet Beijing evening is a pleasant way to pass the time.

So yesterday, watching a pair of kites float in the distance, and thinking of taking a walk to nearby BeiHai park to see the lake and the willows, I remembered a passage from Shen's book.

His wife Chen Yun was still alive and their life was happy:

"When lotus flowers bloom in the summer, they close up at night but open again in the morning. Yun used to put a few tea leaves in a gauze bag and put it inside a lotus flower before it closed in the evening. The next morning she would take out the tea and boil it with natural spring water. It had a wonderful and unique fragrance."

At BeiHai, Meg and I stopped to watch a group of friends playing trumpets, clarinets and saxophones under the branches of an old tree. People were smiling. People were clapping. Children danced. An man tapped his foot and sang a song.

At the edge of the lake I stopped to snap a photo and thought of Shen, and how nice life here can be.