The Peking (or Beijing) of the title is not literal; if anywhere the location of the novel's main action is a “dream-desert” allowing Vian to play with visual extremes of searing light and heat as well as intense blackness and night.

It takes place in an imaginary desert called Exopotamie where a train station and a railway line are under construction.

[3] Autumn in Peking was written in 1946, a prolific year for Vian, in which he wrote three novels, L’ecume des jours (Froth on the Daydream), J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Spit on Your Graves) and L'Automne à Pékin (Autumn in Peking) J. K. L. Scott describes this novel as a narrative of disillusion set in the adult world, rooted in the absurdities of industrial society, and a story of hopeless love (much like Vian's preceding novel L’ecume des jours).

Angel, the central figure of the Autumn in Beijing, is also the husband and father of Clementine's children in L'Arrache-cœur.

[5] James Sallis in his review in the Boston Globe describes a novel about an "expedition to build a railway in the desert of Exopotamie, populated with engineers, randy priests and hermits, lovelorn couples, and a physician obsessed with model airplanes, as well as by buses that feed on catfish bones, typewriters that shiver when uncovered, and bedclothes that climb affectionately back into place when thrown back, even a chair that falls ill and must be hospitalized.