Hainan

This winter I visited Hainan, one of the few provinces of the PRC that I had yet to set foot in (the ones I still haven't been to are now Heilongjiang, Jilin, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei and the Tibetan Autonomous Region). 

As China's only tropical island, Hainan is known as the country's prime destination for sun-and-sand holidays. Before the pandemic I was never too interested in going there, preferring to fly to places like Malaysia or Thailand if I wanted a winter getaway in the tropics. But China's pandemic-era border policies have suddenly made Hainan seem like a much more attractive destination. As December rolled around and the mercury dipped below freezing in Beijing, with rumours of the Winter Olympics precipitating further city-wide lockdowns, I decided to buy a cheap ticket to Hainan (tickets from Beijing really are extremely cheap this winter, costing less than 1000 Yuan for a four-hour flight).

I spent most of my time in Hainan on the coast, near the cities of Wanning and Sanya, where most tourists go. In Wanning I stayed in Riyuewan (the "Sun and Moon Bay"), a little coastal town which has become a Mecca for China's surfing community. Surfing has exploded in China over the past few years, and Riyuewan has exploded with it. It used to be a quiet little fishing community, but the seafront now has a long strip of hotels, cafes and restaurants, most of which didn't exist a year ago. More are being built all the time. 

I arrived on December 23rd, and the town was bustling. Expats from Beijing and Shanghai who had flown down for their Christmas breaks mixed with young Chinese surfers and provincial Chinese sightseers. I was impressed, I have to say, by the sophistication of the food and dining options on offer. The town had a number of good-quality cafes and Western and Thai restaurants which would not have felt out of place in Shanghai (they also had Shanghai prices, unfortunately). Ten or even five years ago it was hard to find such places in Chinese tourist spots, but people's tastes are obviously getting more cosmopolitan.

While there is clearly a community of hard-core surfers in Wanning, many of them dressed in baggy trousers or sporting dreadlocks, they seemed to be outnumbered by visitors attempting to surf for the first time. As with many new fads in China, there's a lot of enthusiasm and willingness to try, but not many people with experience. The stretch of sea where the surfing instructors take their students was packed during the day, and it's a wonder that I didn't see any amateur surfers crash into each other. I actually tried a class myself, for the steep sum of 500 Yuan. It was fun to try, but water sports aren't really my thing, and I found it exceedingly hard to stand up on the surf board without immediately falling over again. 

Riyuewan's beach promenade

In Sanya I spent time in two places, Houhai and Yalong Bay, both of which are well-known tourist hotspots. Houhai is Hainan's party town, a little village on the sea which almost feels like Thailand. The village is small and you can walk everywhere, and once you are there you generally don't leave (the city of Sanya is at least an hour away by taxi). The atmosphere is as laid-back as it gets in China, with people walking around in swimwear and taking sips from coconuts on the pavements. A number of bars spill out onto the beach, where there are parties with DJs every night. 

Once again I was impressed by the quality of the restaurants and cafes, although less so by the hotels. I ended up staying for a couple of nights in a pretty awful budget hotel, as bad as any you might find near a bus station in a provincial Chinese city. Later I moved somewhere nicer, but prices were generally expensive for what was on offer. The constant noise from the streets and the bars made it hard to sleep, too.

I arrived in Houhai a few days before the New Year, and the town was packed with holidaymakers, including seemingly about half the foreigners still left in China. Unable to go to Thailand or fly home for Christmas, lots of expats decided to make their way to this town at the very southern tip of China's territory (it is at the same latitude as Central Vietnam) to celebrate the New Year. I am no longer used to seeing this many non-Chinese people in one place in China, and the effect was rather surreal. Between that and the laid-back atmosphere, it almost felt like I was no longer in the same country. The party on the beach on New Year's Eve went on way into the night, with plenty of fireworks, something that is no longer allowed in Beijing. 

The sea in Houhai was full of people surfing, mostly first-timers, just like in Riyuewan. The waters are actually rather dangerous, with plenty of treacherous undercurrents, and accidents do happen. The beach had a large notice on it clearly stating that swimming and surfing are forbidden, but it was widely ignored. I found this same easy-going attitude towards rules and regulations on display everywhere in Hainan, in contrast with much of China, which over the last decade has become a country of rules that actually have to be followed (by us common mortals, at least). I guess the famous "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away" saying still means something on this island province.

The local authorities also seem to be quite relaxed about anti-pandemic regulations, and much more welcoming towards foreigners than in many other provinces. Although a hotel in Baoting and one in Sanya did cancel my booking after they realised I was a foreign citizen, most hotels seem to have no restrictions on hosting foreigners. Most hotels didn't ask to see a Health Code, and no one ever asked me how long it is since I have last entered China. I also encountered no police checkpoints between cities even in the "autonomous" ethnic minority county I visited, in sharp contrast with many areas of China. 

Couple shooting wedding photo, Yalong Bay

Yoga class on the beach, Houhai

After Houhai I moved to Yalong Bay, a bit further down the coast, which had a completely different vibe. It felt more like Florida, an area of fancy resorts, shopping malls and boulevards lined with palm trees. The beach was full of families on vacation and Chinese couples taking their wedding photos. I also hopped over to Dadong Hai, the area of the city of Sanya closest to the sea, where people go for the bars and nightlife. The signs in Russian in the bar street attest to the fact that before the pandemic a lot of Russians used to visit Sanya. 

Although I went to Hainan mainly to relax and get away from the winter cold, I did want to leave the coast and do a little bit of exploring, so I went to up Baoting for a couple of nights. Baoting is a town in the interior, north of Sanya, which serves as the capital of the Baoting Li and Miao Autonomous County. Hainan, although known in the rest of China mainly as a resort island, is actually quite ethnically diverse. As large as Taiwan, and with ten million inhabitants, it has an interior mostly untouched by mass tourism. The original inhabitants are the Li people, who speak a language related to Thai and have lived on the island for thousands of years.

Although the Han Chinese have been residing in Hainan for over a thousand years, they only really started moving there en masse in the 16th and 17th centuries, when they took over all the areas capable of intense cultivation and the Li people were pushed into the mountains. To this day there are over a million Li in Hainan, living mostly in the mountains in the south of the island. A lot of them fought as communist guerrillas during the Second World War and were massacred by the Guomindang and the Japanese, something which has placed them in good stead with the Communist Party. There are also quite a few Miao people in the island, the descendants of soldiers who were brought over centuries ago to put down a rebellion by the Li and ended up staying and settling in the mountains beside them.

In Baoting I saw little obvious sign of this ethnic diversity, except for a a few elderly women in traditional clothing, but the provincial town did feel a world away from flashy Sanya. I had to take a long-distance bus to get there, since train lines in Hainan don't extend beyond the coast. I climbed the nearby Qixianling mountain, well known for the seven ridges at the top which give it its name (the seven-fairy mountain), while I took in the tropical vegetation. The area nearby is famed for its hot springs, and a number of resorts have been built for tourists.

I got a better taste of Hainan's diversity in Wanning, when I rented an electric scooter and took a day trip to the nearby "Bali village". The village is located inland, next to the town of Xinglong. The town was created by Chinese-Indonesians who "returned" to China in the 50s, escaping from anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia. The Party settled them in this corner of Hainan, where the tropical climate was similar to Indonesia and they would be able to plant the same crops. 

The "Bali village" was mostly a collection of exhibits and buildings built in a Balinese style in the middle of the rainforest. The place was staffed by local women dressed in traditional Balinese costumes, in a display of what would now be called "cultural appropriation" in the West. There were also some partisan but interesting explanations on the history of the Chinese-Indonesians in the area. While it was all slightly kitsch, the tropical forest all around gave me the illusion that I was actually in Bali. 

After visiting the Bali village, I got back on my scooter and drove to Xinglong. While it looks like any Southern Chinese town, I ate in a local restaurant where much of the food was clearly Indonesian-influenced, including the little cakes. Between the tropical scenery, the food and the fact that I was getting around by scooter, it almost felt like I was in fact back in Indonesia. You can find a surprisingly frank description of the area's history by China Daily here. 

The entrance to the Bali Village

Replica Balinese pavilion

Local women dressed in Balinese costume

The seven peaks of Qixianling

Hainan has many other interesting pockets of ethnic diversity, for instance a small community of Utsul who fled there from Vietnam centuries ago, and are classified as Hui by the state because they are Muslims (it seems they have not escaped the general crackdown on Islamic practice going on all over the country). There are also small communities of what used to be called "Sea Gypsies", a Chinese-speaking ethnic group who traditionally live on boats. It would be interesting, one day, to visit all of these areas. 

All in all, I was quite impressed with Hainan. I was, to be honest, expecting the resort towns to be garish and overcrowded, but they were, for the most part, nice places to relax. The mountainous interior of the island, at least in the less populous South, seemed lush and not too commercialised. The fact that public transport is rather underdeveloped by Chinese standards, with train lines only connecting the main cities on the coast, probably helps to keep things that way. The local people seemed remarkably friendly and easy-going, helping to make the island feel more like South-East Asia than China. 

The view behind my guesthouse, near Riyuewan