Ocean Paradise — the train over the sea

Ten years for a theme park

The Li'an lagoon, south of the county town of Lingshui, was long known only to fishermen. In the early 2010s the property group R&F began planning a marine park here, explicitly modelled on the big theme parks in Orlando. It took around ten years from idea to opening.

The park opened on 22 December 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. According to the group, around 6.5 billion yuan was invested, roughly 800 million euros. The grounds cover about 130 hectares and include five hotels with almost 4,000 rooms between them — the Hyatt by the park alone has more than a thousand. The whole thing is designed for seven million visitors a year.

A name disappears

R&F is one of the big Chinese developers that got into serious trouble in the property crisis from 2021. While the park was welcoming its first visitors, the group was negotiating with its creditors to defer billions in debt.

The complex is now simply called “Hainan Ocean Paradise”, in Chinese “Hainan Ocean Joy World”. The developer's name has disappeared. It still appears everywhere online, in travel blogs and on older maps — a good example of how quickly names change in China and how slowly the internet follows.

The train over the water

The real experience is the “South Sea train”. It runs on an elevated track around a 3.3-kilometre loop over shallow seawater and the lagoon's harbour basins. The cars have glass windows on all sides; you glide a few metres above the water. According to the park, it was China's first monorail running over shallow water.

The advertising likes to compare it with the train over the sea in a famous Japanese animated film, and that's not entirely wrong. The train is both transport and viewpoint: it links the parts of the grounds, and from above you see the lagoon, the fishing boats of Li'an, the hotel buildings and the open sea all at once.

Five worlds and an observation tower

The park is divided into five areas, with aquariums, rides, a water park and a waterfront zone. One of them is called “Sansha City”, after the city China founded for the islands in the South China Sea — even a theme park can be a political statement. If you later visit the harbour at Tanmen in Qionghai, you'll understand why this name was chosen.

The main attractions are a roller coaster with more than a kilometre of track and a 123-metre observation tower overlooking the whole coast. Figures on the animals vary widely by source, from 300 to 1,500 species — officially around 40,000 marine animals are mentioned, most of them from the South China Sea.

Polar bears in the tropics

Part of the park is a polar world, with beluga whales, penguins, walruses and polar bears — on an island where it rarely gets colder than 15 degrees. The operator advertises having the only polar animal house in the tropics. There are also shows with dolphins and sea lions.

Whether you want to support that is a decision everyone has to make for themselves. If you don't, you still needn't miss the best part: the train is also sold on its own or in small packages. Then you see the lagoon and the sea without going into the animal houses. The park, incidentally, stresses its conservation projects — a seagrass station and coral farming with Chinese marine scientists.

Ten minutes away

Perhaps the strongest thought at this place lies outside the fence. Just a few kilometres further, in the neighbouring Xincun lagoon, the Tanka have lived on the water for generations, in wooden houses on floating rafts — and their way of life is shrinking.

Here, by contrast, a billion-yuan project carries visitors on stilts over the same water, with a view of hotels with a thousand rooms. Seeing both on the same weekend tells you more about today's China than any commentary.

How to approach the visit

The park is open during the day and has an evening programme in season. For travellers who mainly want the train and the view, the cheaper afternoon ticket is enough: arrive around 15:00, ride the train first, then walk around the grounds and enjoy the evening light over the lagoon.

The grounds are very large and have little shade. Water, sun protection and comfortable shoes belong in your backpack. On weekdays it's much emptier than at weekends and during the Chinese holidays.