China Guide
Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan Island
Hainan Island
For foreign and domestic tourists alike, the most obvious reason to come to Hainan Island – a 300-kilometre-broad spread of beaches and mountain scenery rising out of the South China Sea between Guangdong and Vietnam – is to flop down on its warm, sandy beaches near the southern city of Sanya. Initially, however, there doesn't seem much more to get excited about. Haikou, Hainan's capital, bears evidence of brief colonial occupation, but its primary importance is as a transit point, while Han towns along the east coast have only slightly more character. Spend a little time elsewhere, however, and things start to get more interesting: the highlands around the town of Tongshi are the place to start looking for Li culture, and the mountainous southwest hides some forgotten nature reserves. There are even a handful of underwater sites off the southern coast, the only place in provincial China to go scuba diving.
Hainan is no paradise, however. Ecological decline began in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward, and escalated through the 1960s when Red Guards sent over from the mainland became involved in the first large-scale clearing of Hainan's forests to plant cash crops. Successive governments have continued stripping the island's natural resources and abandoning the inhabitants to fend for themselves: while there are skyscrapers and modern factories around the cities, you'll also see country people so poor that they live in lean-tos made of mud and straw. Rainforest has all but ceded to eroded plantations given over to experimentation with different crops – rubber, mango, coconuts and coffee – in the hope that a market will emerge. Tourism seems to be the sole reliable source of income, and everyone is desperate to be involved. Persistent marketing has made Hainan the place that all Chinese want to come for a holiday, but investment has been wildly over-optimistic, with numerous hotels and entertainment complexes around the place standing empty. Hainan is more expensive than the adjacent mainland and even Chinese tourists grumble about being constantly overcharged.
Hainan is best between December and April, when the climate is generally dry and tropically moderate.