This on-going study attempts at elucidating the geographical imagination, historiographical choices and ideological orientations of Zhu Kezhen, a pioneer in Chinese Meteorology in the early 1960s. This paper try to shed light on the representations of time, space, "the world" and "China" that unfold in Zhu Kezhen's climatic knowledge, and to interpret the categories of this "instituted imaginary" (Castoriadis, 1975) specific to an individual subject and a society taken collectively, without necessarily being able to disentangle what belongs to one or the other. A whole range of intertextualities, discourses, historical experiences, ideological burdens and knowledge belonging to both immediate history and longer timeframes, to a "Chinese" context and to global circulation, all contribute to the constitution of this "instituted imaginary". Meteorology and climate history are fields that mobilize multiple temporal and spatial scales. Zhu Kezhen's scientific writings is constantly permeated by a spatio-temporal imaginary, cultural references and national ideological stakes. From his early work, marked by a powerful environmental and climatic determinism, to his later studies on a history of climate based on phenological sources and his highly sino-centric historiography of meteorological knowledge, Zhu Kezhen never ceases to bring the fluctuations of the global atmosphere down to a "Chinese" land.