Six hours in the air, no sleep worth counting. We landed at Pudong at seven and went straight to Zhujiajiao. No hotel stop, no rest. I was bracing for the worst version of myself.

Then: green. Everywhere, that particular green that only exists when spring is just deciding to be serious about itself. Zhujiajiao has been serious for much longer. The town is over 1,700 years old, built along a web of canals that once carried rice and fabric across the region during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Merchants came and went for centuries through these same waterways. That morning the canals were waking up early, busy alleys with all the vendors but the boats moving without urgency, and I understood why people kept returning to a place like this. The contrast was captivating.

First money I spent in China was a glass of fresh orange juice for 28 yuan and I stood there on the street and drank it like it was medicine.

It was medicine, actually.

I grew up in the tropics where sweetness is just there, always available, year-round, reliable. You stop noticing it because it never goes away. But that orange juice in spring Zhujiajiao tasted like the orange had been waiting. Like it knew this was its moment and it wasn’t going to waste it.

I remember thinking something similar in London once, years ago, in summer. The roses there smelled more intensely than any rose I had encountered elsewhere. I used to think it was the variety, or the romance of being on holiday. But I don’t think that’s it. I think the roses know their season is short. So they give everything they have, all at once. The spring oranges know the same thing.

Standing there with that juice, sunlight coming through the leaves in the lush green, on and off as the clouds shifted, I felt something loosen in me. I can tolerate life at the moment. That is enough. Sometimes that is more than enough.

The visit was short, as all arranged tour visits are. Always a little breathless, always someone calling the group to move. But I manage to see two temples. The smaller one was crowded and alive, locals pressing close to the deities, the money god receiving the most attention, incense and murmuring and the particular energy of people asking for real things. The larger one was Yuanjin Buddhist Temple, facing the main canal directly. Its multi-tiered pagoda has stood in this spot since the Ming dynasty, rising in dark wood and warm ochre, red lanterns hanging at the archways, Chinese characters bold on the peach-coloured walls. Boats came and went in front of it like the temple and the water had agreed on this arrangement centuries ago. Perhaps they had.

I took a photograph. On-and-off sunlight, partly cloudy. A boatman standing and punting, his wooden vessel crossing the frame. The pagoda behind him. Green water below, open sky above. It looked like something from a scroll painting, except the coloured rope floats at the canal’s edge kept it honestly present.

I also bought a vest from a street vendor. A pretty thing. I probably could have found the same one anywhere. But I wear it sometimes and the orange juice comes back, the sweetness of something that knows it won’t last forever, offering itself anyway.