Danzhou

The coffee arrived before I had ordered it. I had sat down at a narrow counter on a side street in the old part of Danzhou — more of an awning over a collection of wooden stools than anything you would call a cafe — and the woman running it placed a small glass in front of me with the decisiveness of someone who knew I was going to want this. It was robusta, grown in the hills west of town, brewed strong enough that the spoon would have stood up if I had tried, then cut with sweetened condensed milk until the colour reached the amber of strong tea. Hot. Slightly syrupy. A flavour that was neither the clean bitterness of Vietnamese robusta nor the bright acidity of anything from East Africa, but something specific to this island, this latitude, this soil.

Hainan has been growing coffee since the late nineteenth century, when Overseas Chinese returning from Southeast Asia brought seeds back from Malaysia and Indonesia. The industry grew quietly and locally until it was nearly destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, then revived in the 1980s and found itself, by accident, the only significant domestic coffee-producing region in China. Danzhou is at the centre of it — the hillsides west of the city hold most of the island’s working plantations, and on still mornings the roasting operations send something into the air that makes the whole approach to the city smell like a slow and pleasant decision. The coffee is almost entirely consumed locally. Almost none of it exports. Which is part of why, if you drink it anywhere else, you will not taste the same thing.

The city itself is not set up for tourism and makes no particular effort to be. The old quarter has covered market streets where produce comes in on the backs of motorcycles and the butcher’s display has the unabashed quality of a place where people buy food to eat rather than to photograph. I spent a morning in the market buying things I recognised and things I did not — a bag of dried longan, a cluster of finger-bananas still on the stem, a paper cone of roasted seeds from a variety of squash I had not seen before. Everything was cheap. Nobody charged me extra for being foreign, which I have learned not to take for granted.

The food of Danzhou takes the broader Hainanese palette and inflects it with the northwest of the island’s particular ingredients: goat cooked with fermented black beans and galangal, a noodle soup with a pork-bone broth that simmers from what one proprietor told me, with some pride, was four in the morning. The goat dish in particular was worth the journey on its own terms — the meat falling from the bone, the galangal cutting through the fat with a brightness that was almost citric, the fermented beans adding a depth I kept trying to identify and failing. I ordered it twice at the same place and the proprietor began showing me photographs on his phone of other foreigners who had done the same.

When to go: November through March is the most comfortable window — cool enough to walk the market streets and explore the coffee plantations without the humidity becoming a project. The coffee harvest runs roughly from October through January, when the hillsides around Danzhou are at their most active.