Beaches in China

Eighteen thousand kilometres of coast running from the Yellow Sea to the tropics, and almost all of it is working shoreline — ports, aquaculture, shipyards and industry rather than beach. Beach tourism is concentrated in two places. Hainan in the far south sits at the latitude of Hawaii and was a poor agricultural province and a place of political exile until it became a special economic zone in 1988; it was built into a resort coast within two decades, and Sanya at its southern tip now holds high-rise hotel frontage, duty-free malls and the bays at Yalong and Haitang. The northern resorts of Qingdao and Beidaihe work a short summer instead, both of them nineteenth and early twentieth-century sea-bathing towns — Qingdao German, Beidaihe the summer retreat of the Chinese leadership — where the season runs roughly June to September and the water is cold either side of it. Beaches are public. The beach culture differs from the western default in ways worth knowing before arriving: full sun protection is normal and tanning is not the object, swimming happens at dawn and dusk more than at noon, facekinis appear on the northern beaches, and crowds at holiday weekends are of an order most visitors have not seen. Practically: Hainan is a domestic destination first and English is limited outside the large hotels, typhoon season runs July to October on both coasts, and the island can be entered visa-free by many nationalities on terms that differ from the mainland's.