Dongjiao — the coconut forest

A forest that is an economy

Dongjiao lies on a spit of land south of Wenchang town, opposite Qinglan port. Driving here, you drive for kilometres through palms: along the road, between the houses, right down to the beach. In the villages the houses stand among the trunks, hammocks are strung from palm to palm, and heaps of nuts lie in front of every other house.

Unlike in Sanya's hotel gardens, nothing here is decoration. Every palm is a piece of income. Once you understand how much depends on this one plant, you see the palms of the whole island with different eyes.

Half of half

On Hainan they say: half of Hainan's coconuts come from Wenchang, and half of Wenchang's from Dongjiao. Since Hainan is practically China's only coconut province, around a quarter of China's coconuts come from this one place.

The figures are impressive: according to 2024 data, about two million palms stand on around 88 square kilometres, bearing more than 20 million nuts a year. The town has fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, and around 15,000 of them live directly or indirectly from the coconut.

Washed up from Southeast Asia

Why so many palms grow here of all places is often explained with a story. In summer, currents in the South China Sea flow north-east from the islands of Southeast Asia. Coconuts that fell into the sea there drifted for more than a hundred days and finally washed up here, on the Dongjiao spit, which stands in the current's way. A coconut can float that long and still germinate afterwards.

Nobody knows whether it really happened like that. But the story suits an island whose people, coffee and cuisine brought so much from Southeast Asia — why not the palms themselves?

Red, green, tall and short

Not all coconut palms are the same. Dongjiao has more than fifty varieties: tall palms reaching twenty metres and more that are harvested by climbers, short dwarf varieties you can almost pick from the ground, palms with green and with reddish-orange nuts. Then there's the nipa palm, which grows in the brackish water of the mangroves.

In the town's coconut park stands a special tree: a palm over a hundred years old that splits into two crowns at the top. Coconut palms normally never branch. The locals call it the “Coconut King”.

Glory, decline, new road

In the 1990s the Dongjiao coconut forest was one of Hainan's best-known images, on postcards and in travel brochures. Buses brought tourists to a holiday resort on the beach. Then came the decline: the facility aged, visitors stayed away, and land reclamation and building projects destroyed parts of the beach.

The area was rediscovered with the new coastal road around the island. So the loveliest way to experience Dongjiao today isn't the old resort but the drive through the palm villages and a stop at one of the small roadside restaurants.

All from one nut

Almost everything from a coconut palm gets used. Dongjiao is home to around a third of all the province's coconut businesses, more than 380 according to 2021 figures. Here they make coconut milk, coconut oil, dried coconut flesh, sweets, mattresses from the husk fibres and even activated carbon from the hard shells. The products go all over China, to Southeast Asia and as far as Europe.

For some years many farmers have been selling their nuts directly online, prepared for drinking and shipped in cool boxes. One small cooperative says it ships twenty thousand nuts a month this way. The Dongjiao coconut has become a brand in China.

Coconut chicken and coconut rice

A fresh coconut costs only a few yuan at the roadside; the farmers open it with a machete and stick a straw in. Once you've drunk it, they split the nut completely so you can spoon out the soft flesh.

The local speciality is coconut chicken: a hot pot in which chicken is cooked in coconut water — considered a Hainan invention and now popular throughout China. It's served like this: first the fresh coconut water goes into the pot, and once it's hot you drink a bowl of it neat — only then does the chicken go in, usually the famous Wenchang chicken. After a few minutes it's done and is dipped in a sauce of soy sauce, lime, garlic and small hot chillies. With it comes rice cooked in the nut, and for dessert qingbuliang, a cold soup of coconut milk, beans and fruit.

Neighbours: researchers and rockets

Wenchang is also home to China's only research institute for coconut palms. Since 1980 it has run a large display garden nearby with palms from all over the world, where new varieties are bred that bear more nuts and withstand wind better.

And since 2024 Dongjiao has a brand-new neighbour: China's first commercial rocket launch site lies within the town's area. Drinking a coconut here, with a bit of luck you can watch a rocket rise above the palms.

How to approach the visit

Dongjiao is most beautiful in the late afternoon until the golden hour, when the light falls low through the trunks. Drive through the villages by Didi, get out wherever you like and then walk down to the sea. For dinner, coconut chicken in one of the village restaurants.

Buy coconuts directly from the farmers at the roadside; it's cheaper and fresher than in the tourist shops. And don't park or sit directly under the palms: a falling nut weighs one to two kilos.