Coconut Dream Corridor

Asia's first boulevard

The Coconut Dream Corridor, Yēmèng Chángláng in Chinese, is the waterfront promenade of Sanya Bay. In China it is often called “Asia's first boulevard”, a name as self-confident as the city: 20.8 kilometres long, 20 to 90 metres wide, around a hundred hectares of green space between road and sea. It runs from the port in the east, where the Sanya River meets the sea, to Tianya Bay in the west.

According to Chinese sources the promenade cost around 18 million yuan — a modest sum for a project of this length. Most of the money went not into buildings but into trees. The planners chose coastal species with broad crowns, plenty of shade and few pests. The result is an almost continuous avenue of coconut palms interspersed with other shade-giving coastal trees.

Three sections, three characters

Walk or ride the full length and you notice that the promenade is not one uniform place. Near the city it is a leisure and strolling zone: squares, benches, stalls, people. Further west come the public bathing beaches and the water-sports area. In the far west lies the hotel zone with the big resorts, where it gets quieter and more manicured.

Sanya Bay Road runs parallel to the promenade. Open-air beer gardens have settled along it, serving draught beer and grilled seafood in the evening — a very Chinese kind of beach bar: loud, bright and cheap.

Who the promenade belongs to

In China Sanya counts as a luxury destination: Haitang Bay, Yalong Bay, grand resort names, the world's largest duty-free malls. From the outside you'd assume the city was built for people with money.

The corridor tells a different story. It is public, open around the clock and free — and in the evening it belongs to the people who live here. Early in the morning tai chi groups train, along with the pensioners from the north-east who spend the winter here. In the evening people dance to music from portable speakers, men play cards, children ride rental scooters, vendors crack open coconuts. Nobody has to buy anything to be part of it.

For a long time Sanya Bay was also the only one of the big bays where fishermen were still allowed to haul nets from the beach — in Dadonghai and Yalong Bay this had long been banned. By old custom the catch was shared equally and sold by the families at a small fish market nearby. With luck, early in the morning you still see boats on the beach.

The island in view

From the eastern end of the promenade a group of curving high-rises stands out in the sea. That is Phoenix Island, Fènghuáng Dǎo in Chinese — not a natural island but an artificial one, begun in 2002. It is about 1,250 metres long, lies in the south-east of Sanya Bay and is linked to the city by a 394-metre bridge.

It carries hotel and apartment towers, a marina and what its operators call China's first dedicated cruise port. In China it is therefore dubbed the “Dubai of the East”. At night it is lit up and gives the bay its skyline. It is the first example of an idea you'll see again and again on Hainan: land you don't have is simply built up from the sea.

Where Sanya got its name

At the eastern end of the corridor the Sanya River flows into the sea. According to the common explanation the city takes its name from it: two branches of the river meet here and form the shape of the character 丫, a forked branch. From this came 三亚, Sanya.

The city itself is young. For centuries Yazhou, a good 40 kilometres further west, was the administrative centre of the south. Sanya was a fishing village on the river and only grew into what you see today in the 20th century.

Four bays, four characters

Sanya's bays are not interchangeable. Yalong Bay in the east has the clearest water and the big resorts. Haitang Bay, further east still, is the most expensive zone. Dadonghai lies in the middle of the city and is the locals' beach. Sanya Bay is the long city coastline to the west.

Facing west means: this is where the sun sets. Chinese travel portals have their own name for this stretch — the “orange sea”, because shortly before sunset the water takes on the colour of the sky. The eastern bays get sunrises; here the evening light falls through the palm fronds onto the water.