Although it is 30 degrees Celsius outside, you can already feel the cold as you approach the L+Snow resort. In part this is psychological, because the early arrivals by the main entrance are fully dressed in ski gear. But in part it is real: The sheer force of the industrial-grade refrigeration system has generated a slight breeze.

Located about 90 minutes outside China’s biggest city, Shanghai’s L+Snow resort opened last month, anointed by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest indoor ski centre in the world. It edged out the previous biggest, in the northern Chinese province of Harbin, which is in turn closely followed by one in Guangdong, and another in Sichuan.In Shanghai, the advent of 90,000 sq metres where temperatures are maintained at minus 3 degrees Celsius to minus 5 degree Celsius has a commercial appeal even before skiing enters the equation. The city has just experienced one of its hottest summers on record, with temperatures hitting or surpassing 37 degrees for 12 consecutive days. Like the indoor Ski Dubai centre, which opened in 2005, L+Snow is an exercise in contrasts; the electricity alone costs about Rmb80,000-Rmb100,000 per day (US$11,000-US$14,000). A representative for the new centre said the total costs of the project were not public, though Chinese media reports suggest a budget of about Rmb7 billion (US$1 billion).

But across China, which hosted the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022fortunejack, the aim is not merely to defy the seasons. President Xi Jinping has set a target of creating 300 million skiers by 2030 and spearheaded a wave of winter sports investment. Hundreds of new ski resorts have been established across the country, compared with fewer than a dozen in the 1990s. It is not only the indoor variety that have raised environmental concerns; the National Alpine Skiing Centre in Yanqing used in the Olympics was controversial for its use of artificial snow, though that complaint has been raised at multiple different games.

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