City Observer: The Magical Scent of Autumn

I still remember vividly a moment from long ago, when I first started my career working on a coffee project, helping Suntory’s RTD coffee brand enter the Chinese market for the very first time. Our team head, a true maven in branding and consumer insight, leaned over and shared his thoughts with me quietly:

“The first thing that attracts you, the thing you remember most when you step into a café, is the aroma from the coffee beans in the machine. Long before you are ever enticed by the coffee itself.”

At that time, I was young, scratching my head during the reporting stage, trying desperately to grasp the brand’s USP and its positioning in China. What he said felt like a small revelation. Looking back now, it was one of the earliest enlightening moments of my career, even though I was still too green to fully understand the deeper meaning behind it.

Years later, I recalled what he told me, how aroma can awaken something unconscious in us, because this became the most distinctive memory I carried from the European cities I visited. It was in those fleeting moments that the scent of a city awakened in me, like a hidden compass guiding me through the puzzle of a complex modern city. In Italian, they call it “profumo d’autunno,” the scent of autumn.

Photo by the author at Museo Astronomico – Orto Botanico di Brera, Milan.

Wherever I walked along the historic streets of Milan, I was surrounded by this just-right scent, a blend of wood and flower, rich but never overwhelming. It intoxicated me, making me pause and take a deep inhale every time I passed the climbing vines draped across the walls of old houses. This experience reached its apex in Parco Sempione, the green heart of Milan, where I was enveloped by perfectly pruned plants, rows of trees, and a wide variety of shrubs, flowers, and leaves whose names I still cannot recognize.

Photo by the author at Parco Sempione, in Milan.

Beyond the natural scents from the plants, I was also struck by the aroma diffuser placed intentionally next to the bed in the loft where I stayed, and by the fragrance of the shampoo and cleanser in the bathroom. It was a scent unfamiliar to someone like me, who had lived too long surrounded by the familiar oriental fragrances of China. This one was strong, warm, exotic, yet comforting. My curiosity was piqued, and I discovered that the brands they used were not famous or luxurious, but simple household names common in European homes. What amazed me was how their choice of scent revealed a personal, discerning taste and a quiet, genuine sophistication toward life.

In Chinese culture, our ancestors have a long history of using natural scents to adorn rooms and to make scent accessories such as 香囊 (xiāngnáng, fragrance sachets), filled with herbs and worn originally during festivals like the Dragon Boat Festival to repel insects and ward off the summer heat, later evolving into a daily ritual. I once read an anecdote that in the Forbidden City, they placed a large ceramic jar filled with a special variety of apples at the center of the living hall. The apples were never meant to be eaten; their sweet and enticing aroma was used to lift the mood of guests, to evoke positive feelings and memories. It is also well known that Empress Dowager Cixi favored the scent of Buddha’s hand citrus, and her rooms were decorated with this fruit as her secret to maintaining a good mood every day.

Yet, our understanding of the olfactory mechanisms remains limited, let alone using it deliberately in our daily lives. The most challenging part is that scent cannot be stored or recorded, nor can the feelings and memories it evokes. Perhaps that is what makes it so precious: short-lived, fleeting, but leaving a long-lasting mark in our minds that we never truly forget.