More than anything, Haikou is a truly tropical city, complete with palm-lined streets, something particularly striking if you've just arrived from a miserable northern Chinese winter. Noisy but laid-back, it's also pleasantly shabby - even in upmarket areas, you only have to walk down the side streets to find the usual Chinese jumble of fast-food stalls and hawkers, small trestle tables spread with cheap crockery, clothes and household goods. The old quarter , boxed in by Boai Bei Lu, Jiefang Lu and Datong Lu, is the best area to stroll through with its grid of century-old colonial architecture, here partially restored and functioning as stores and businesses. It's especially good in the evening when the streets are brightly lit and bursting with people out shopping, eating and socializing. Otherwise, Haikou Park (¥2) is small but quite pleasant, with cracked stone statues overhung by shrubbery reputedly from a vanished Ming-dynasty temple.

Haikou has just two formal sights, either of which will fill you in on Hainan's position in Han Chinese history. About 5km west of the downtown area off Shugang Dadao, a park and stone sculptures of lions and guards surround Hai Rui Mu , tomb of the virtuous Ming-dynasty official Hai Rui (daily 9am-4pm; ¥5) - take bus #3 from Changdi Dadao. Hai Rui's honesty, which earned him exile during his lifetime, caused a furore in the 1960s when historian Wu Han wrote a play called The Dismissal of Hai Rui, a parody of events surrounding the treatment of Marshall Peng Dehui , who had criticized Mao's Great Leap Forward. The play's supression and the subsequent arrest of Wu Han, who happened to be a friend of Deng Xiaoping, are generally considered to be the opening events of the Cultural Revolution.

On the other side of town is Wugong Ci , the Five Officials' Memorial Temple, 2.5km southeast of the centre along Haifu Dadao (daily 8.30am-5pm; ¥8; bus #11 or #1). This brightly decorated complex was built during the late Qing to honour Li Deyu, Li Gang, Li Guang, Hu Chuan and Zhao Ding, Tang men of letters who, yet again, were banished here after rashly criticizing their government. There's also a hall in the grounds commemorating Hainan's most famous exile, the rather better-known Song-dynasty poet Su Dongpo , who spent his later years near Danzhou , in the island's northwest.