First Market

More than a market

The First Market is Sanya's largest farmers' market — and has long been more than a hall. Today the name stands for a whole neighbourhood in the city centre, bounded by Jiefang Road, Yuejin Lane and Hexi Road. In between lie Xinmin, Xinjian and Hongqi streets and Yefeng Lane.

At its core, seafood and tropical fruit are traded. Around it a shopping street more than 600 metres long has grown up where you can find almost everything for daily life, plus handicrafts and jewellery at low prices. In the evening a street night market is added. Spend an hour here and you'll see more of Sanya's everyday life than on any beach.

How the system works

The principle is common throughout southern China and confusing for Europeans at first. You buy the seafood raw at a stall and take it to one of the processing restaurants, which cook it for a fee. So you pay twice: once for the goods, once for the work.

The kitchens are mainly on Xinmin Street and in Yefeng Lane, some of them for more than twenty years. Many send someone to the market with you to help you choose. Done right, it is much cheaper than a seafood restaurant — often under 100 yuan per person.

The traps

The first is the unit. Prices are per jin (斤), and one jin is 500 grams, not a kilo. Anyone who takes the posted price for a price per kilo is off by half. It's not a scam but a misunderstanding — though it's rarely cleared up.

The second is the scales. Rigged scales, goods weighed wet, and swapping large animals for small or dead ones between weighing and bagging are the classic problems. Then there's a trick with the cooking fee: it's charged per jin, and some kitchens round every started jin up — 1.1 jin becomes two.

The third are the middlemen. On entering the area you are often approached by women who will walk you to a particular kitchen — for a commission. The same goes for taxi drivers recommending a “good restaurant”. Neither is illegal, but it makes things more expensive.

The remedies are simple: agree the price per jin beforehand, use the market's public check scale to reweigh, have water shaken off, never lose sight of the bag and ask for the cooking fee before cooking. On public holidays it gets very crowded — watch out for pickpockets.

The 2012 scandal

There's a reason Sanya is so sensitive about seafood prices. At Chinese New Year 2012 a post went viral: three dishes in a seafood restaurant for almost 4,000 yuan, plus a second bill of more than 9,000 yuan. The city first announced that there had not been a single complaint over the holidays — and soon had to retract that. Around 600,000 people joined an online campaign called “Don't let yourselves be ripped off”.

The result was a pricing system that probably exists nowhere else. Since then the pricing authority has published guide prices and maximum prices per species for seafood restaurants. They are based on wholesale prices recorded every day by an inspection team — at Honggang Market and here, at the First Market. Mark-ups were capped, in 2012 for example at 190 per cent for fish and 90 per cent for prawns and crabs. A fish costing ten yuan per jin here could thus cost at most around 29 yuan in a restaurant.

So you are not standing just anywhere in this market. You're standing where Sanya decides every morning what fish may cost throughout the city.

And today?

The issue hasn't completely gone away. In May 2026 another case made the Chinese news: four mantis shrimps for 1,035 yuan. The authority found that the price had been displayed and was within the rules — but the guest hadn't signed the order slip.

The city now publishes guide prices for more than a hundred kinds of seafood, sets caps for upscale restaurants too and has created a guarantee fund from which guests are compensated in advance in proven cases. The lesson for visitors is simple: in Sanya a price is legitimate if it is displayed and you sign it. So do the maths before you sign.

Not just fish

Around the market it's worth simply eating your way through: Hainan noodles for breakfast, qingbuliang — the Hainanese coconut dessert with beans, peanuts and dates —, sticky rice cakes, rice cooked in a coconut, Shanlan rice wine made from mountain rice and freshly pressed juices. Papaya and coconut are the best.

The fruit stalls are where you really should haggle. The first prices are often well above what you end up paying.