Wenchang

I rented a scooter in Sanya on a Tuesday morning with no particular plan beyond getting north of the resort belt. The coastal highway ran through rubber plantations and palm groves with the sea occasionally visible through the trees, and I drove for two hours with the heat building and the smell of the vegetation changing as the landscape shifted from tourist infrastructure into something that felt like the island actually living its life. Wenchang appeared as a series of low buildings around a river and a sign that I could not read but that everyone had told me meant chicken.

The chicken is the whole point of coming here, and I want to describe it carefully because it is one of those dishes where the simplicity of the method is exactly what makes the result astonishing. The bird is poached in its own stock at a temperature that is barely a simmer — the water shudders rather than boils — until the meat is cooked through but barely, still faintly pink at the joint, with a texture that is both firm and yielding in a way that overcooked chicken can never be. It is served at room temperature, chopped, over rice that has been cooked in the chicken fat and stock, with a sauce of fresh ginger grated fine, spring onion, salt, and enough good oil to make the whole thing glisten. That is it. No more than six ingredients total. I ate it at a roadside place the first day, a market stall the second, and then went back to the roadside place the third because the rice there had the better flavour. The proprietor recognized me by day two and found this pleasing.

Beyond the chicken — and there is genuinely more beyond the chicken — Wenchang has a certain pleasant ordinariness that I find more interesting than many places designed specifically for tourists. The market along the river sells produce I could not entirely identify: strange citrus varieties, bundles of herbs that smelled of both mint and camphor, coconuts in three different sizes for purposes that were explained to me in Hainanese and which I did not understand. The Qinglan Harbour, twenty minutes out of town, is where the prawns come from that appear in restaurants all over Hainan, and you can eat them there from boats that have been converted into floating restaurants, the shrimp still flinching as they arrive at the table.

The Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site is nearby — China’s newest and most southern launch facility, positioned here partly because of the latitude advantage for getting satellites into geostationary orbit. You cannot visit the launch site itself, but around the town you find a certain local pride in the connection to the space program that manifests in restaurant names and murals and a surprising number of rocket-shaped monuments in roundabouts. It is a strange and somehow endearing combination of things: the island’s most traditional dish and its most futuristic infrastructure, both originating in the same provincial city.

When to go: October through April is ideal — the roads are dry, the heat is manageable, and the scooter ride from the south is genuinely enjoyable. If you go in the summer months, go prepared for heavy rain and check the typhoon forecasts; the coastal highway can flood.