Sanya

The far south of Hainan was for most of Chinese history a frontier, known as Yazhou and settled around the mouth of the Sanya River. The Li people, the island's earliest inhabitants, lived in the hills and along the rivers long before Han settlement, and Hui Muslim communities descended from sea traders settled on the coast from the Song period onwards. Successive dynasties used the island as a place of exile for disgraced officials; the Tang monk Jianzhen was blown ashore on Hainan on one of his attempts to reach Japan, and the Buddhist complex west of the city takes its theme from that story.

Under the Ming and Qing, Yazhou was a small walled administrative town with a fishing and salt economy, far from the centres of power. It gained strategic value in the 20th century for its deep, sheltered harbours; Japanese forces occupied the island from 1939 to 1945 and developed the port. After 1949 the area remained a quiet naval and fishing district of Guangdong province.

The change came at the end of the 1980s. Sanya was made a city in 1987, and in 1988 Hainan was separated from Guangdong to become a province and a special economic zone; the bays were opened to resort development, first at Dadonghai and then on a much larger scale at Yalong Bay in the 1990s and Haitang Bay in the 2010s. Tourism, a free-trade port scheme announced in 2020 and generous duty-free shopping allowances for domestic visitors have made this one of the fastest-growing cities in China, with the airport, the island rail loop and cruise berths all expanded to match.

Sanya's population is a mixture of very different communities. The Li, who make up about 15 per cent of Hainan's population, are the island's indigenous inhabitants and keep their own language, brocade weaving, bamboo-beating dances and the March the Third spring festival; Li villages and theme parks inland from the city are where most visitors encounter that culture. The Miao, who arrived from the mainland centuries ago, live in similar hill districts. The Hui, known as the Utsul, are Muslim, speak a language unrelated to any other in mainland China, and run much of the local fishing and market trade.

Over them lies a large migrant layer: hotel and construction workers from inland provinces, and northern retirees who spend the winter here in rented flats, a migration large enough to change the accent of whole neighbourhoods between seasons. The result is a city where Mandarin dominates, where Hainanese, Li and Hui speech are all heard, and where much of the year's rhythm is set by visitors.

The culture of the place is accordingly relaxed and commercial rather than ceremonial. Life happens outdoors and late: tea and card games under the palms, seafront exercise groups at dawn, and the beach promenades busy until midnight in the warm months. Coconuts, sea and tropical colour dominate local imagery, and the city markets itself to the rest of China as the country's own tropics.

About 1.1 million people live in the municipality, which stretches from the coastal bays back into hill districts of rubber, mango and betel nut. Resident numbers swing sharply with the seasons, rising by hundreds of thousands in winter when retirees from the north arrive, and many flats along Sanya Bay stand empty for half the year. Property prices rose so fast in the 2010s that the provincial government restricted purchases by non-residents.

Tourism is the economy: hotels, restaurants, boat operators, duty-free retail, wedding photography and the trades that serve them. Fishing continues from the harbour on the Sanya River, tropical agriculture supplies out-of-season fruit and vegetables to the rest of China, and a deep-sea research and space-related presence has grown along the coast. The free-trade port scheme has brought construction and new bonded shopping.

Daily life follows the heat. Markets and building sites work early, afternoons are slow, and evenings fill the promenades, night markets and hotpot restaurants. Summer brings typhoon preparation, and the wet months are the local off season, when many businesses close for repairs. Water supply, traffic between the bays, the cost of housing and the seasonality of work are the everyday concerns.

Hainan cooking is light, fresh and built on seafood, chicken, coconut and tropical fruit, and Sanya's version leans hard on the sea. The usual arrangement is to choose live fish, prawns, crab, abalone or clams from tanks at a market or restaurant, have them weighed, and pay a kitchen to steam, grill or stir-fry them with garlic. Hele crab from the island's east coast is among the four dishes Hainan is famous for, alongside Wenchang chicken, Jiaji duck and Dongshan goat, and all four appear on menus here.

Wenchang chicken, poached and served cool with ginger and citrus dipping sauce, is the ancestor of the Hainanese chicken rice found across Southeast Asia. Coconut chicken hotpot simmers the bird in the water of green coconuts at the table. Hainan's noodle traditions are distinct: Hainan rice noodles dressed with peanuts, pickles and a little broth, and the sour, spicy soups of the south. Betel nut is chewed locally, and coconut appears in everything from rice cakes to sweets and the ubiquitous chilled drinking nuts.

Fruit is the other pleasure — mango, dragon fruit, lychee, longan, jackfruit, coconut and pineapple, sold from barrows and markets and at their best in spring and early summer. Hui restaurants near the fishing harbours serve halal seafood and lamb, and the resort bays add international restaurants and hotel buffets to the mix. Coffee culture, brought back from Southeast Asia by returning emigrants, is strong on Hainan, and the island's own coffee is served thick and sweet.