Beijing -- A road crash in northwest China over the weekend has left five people injured -- or winterbeaten, in fact.

Two heavy-duty trucks bumped into each other at 10:00 a.m. Saturday on state highway No. 312 in the juncture area between Gansu Province and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The accident left at least 2,000 diesel trucks in a standstill and many drivers found them unable to restart their engines in the freezing weather.

By 5:00 p.m., the temperature had dropped to minus 22 degrees Celsius and five drivers were frostbitten. [...]

The town was just one of the areas to suffer the sudden temperature drops in northern China.

In Dalian, a beautiful seaside city in the northeastern Liaoning Province, the heaviest snow since 1951 put off 123 flights Sunday and laid over more than 4,000 passengers. School kids were told to stay home on Monday as fallen snow had added up to 28 centimeters in the city proper by 2:00 p.m. Sunday, almost knee-deep.

A cold front from Siberia, accompanied by strong gales, swept across most parts of northern China over the weekend, after an unprecedented long and warm autumn in the recent five decades.

In the national capital Beijing, the maximum daytime temperature dropped below zero for the first time this winter on Saturday. The biting cold and gale-force winds are expected to stay until Wednesday.

The central meteorological bureau said the temperature drop will also affect the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. In some areas the drop will exceed 10 degrees Celsius. Even the southernmost tropical province of Hainan has started to feel the chilly weather: the island province has reported temperature drops from four to seven degrees Celsius since Saturday.
The provincial meteorological bureau said the sharpest drop is yet to come Tuesday night, when temperatures will fall to 11 to 13degrees Celsius in the island's central mountainous regions.

As the minimum temperature fell to minus 18 degrees Celsius in north China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region Sunday, ice appeared in the 110-km-long Wuhai section of the Yellow River, nearly one month earlier than last year. The city government of Wuhai has ordered round-the-clock monitoring of the water level out of fear that the frozen river might damage the embankments and endanger the riverains. [...]