LOCAL restaurants are losing no time in offering cold noodles after the first real heat wave arrived in the city last weekend, bringing the scorching feeling of summer with it.

Given the great variety of ice creams and cold drinks available, light-flavoured cold noodles are no longer especially appealing to people today, unlike their predecessors.

Yet due to its effectiveness in alleviating the summer heat, this traditional dish, passed on through hundreds of years, is still something many Chinese find indispensable during these scorching days.

The dish is more than simply noodles which have gone cold. The process of making the dish is quite complex, including steaming the noodles first before putting them in water to boil to ensure the correct texture. They are then cooled with a fan or cold water. All these processes together give the noodles just the right degree of chewiness.

Eating cold noodles is just one of the many ways ancient Chinese used to cope with the sultry summer. During a time when there were no electric fans, refrigerators, or air conditioners to generate artificial coolness, turning to nature for relief seemed to be the only option.

Emperors had the option of retiring to summer resorts, usually constructed in mountains or by lakes - such as the famous Chengde Summer Resort in North China's Hebei Province and the Summer Palace in Beijing.

Obviously, only a few people could avail themselves of such royal privileges. Most ordinary people had to work out less expensive, yet still effective, ways to stay cool.

"Making rooms as spacious as possible" was the way proposed by Bai Juyi, a famous poet of the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Plum soup

Also in ancient times, many places in China had the tradition of laying reed mats over their yards to diminish the effect of the scorching sunshine. People felt cooler immediately after stepping into such yards. Sitting in the cool, with a fan in hand and a bowl of sour plum soup (a traditional summer drink in China) at their table, may have been almost as comfortable as the situation enjoyed by modern people in an air-conditioned house eating ice cream.

Compared with the emperors and their summer resorts, many ordinary people turned to temples in the mountains as retreats from the heat. Mei Yaochen, a poet of the Song Dynasty (420-479), thought tranquil and remote temples surrounded by old trees were the best places to spend the summer.

More romantically inclined intellectuals and poets favoured lotus ponds shaded by willows. The fragrance of such plants was able to dispel the annoyance of the heat, ancient poems declared.

A much easier way to stay cool was simply to leave the house, although many ancient houses, due to their particular structure - the large roofs especially - were much cooler than the houses of today.

People moved their beds outside into the open and slept under the sky during the hottest days. As well as sleeping outdoors, people also dined out, and chatted the time away outside during the evenings.

This tradition is still well observed in many places in China. Even in a metropolis like Shanghai, it is easy to see people sleeping outside in the lanes, or taking their bowls outside, chatting and eating together with their neighbours.

Use of ice

If you think people only nowadays enjoy the pleasure of eating iced food, you are totally wrong. Many ancient records mentioned iced tea and iced fruits. China's oldest ice cave can be dated back to the Warring States period (475-221 BC).

All the ice was natural, collected during the winter and stored for summer use. People used the ice to store food and also to make iced drinks. But most probably it was only a luxury for rich people.

Later, seeing the great demand, people in China started businesses selling and transporting ice, which helped to extend the use of ice to families which didn't have ice caves or ice boxes.

However, the most famous approach to staying cool among ancient Chinese was to attain a tranquil heart and stay calm. "With a tranquil heart, one naturally feels cool" - this ancient saying is still widely cited as the answer to summer heat.