Sunset at Sun Moon Bay, outside southeastern Hai­nan Island’s Wan­ning City, brings cool breezes and swaying palm trees. Taiwanese businessman Wu Dong­tai likes to come here to unwind on what is the most idyllically tropical of his 42 Hai­nan plantations.

“Beautiful Sanya, so romantic and far away.” Sanya has become a favored destination for mainland Chinese couples looking to shoot romantic wedding photos.

Wu, chairman of Dong Tai Agriculture, has experienced many of the same ups and downs as other Taiwanese businesspeople on Hai­nan.

He came here in 1990 fresh out of the military to take over his uncle’s shrimp farm, then spent the next two years hunkered down at the aquaculture facility in Dong­jiao Town, Wen­chang City, getting a feel for how locals operate.

At the time, Taiwanese businesspeople were raking in big money raising fish and shrimp in mainland China. Wu imported fish fry and equipment from Taiwan (which locals regularly pilfered or stole), and distributed his product through outlets all the way from Hai­nan in the south to Shen­yang in the north. But Wu fretted in spite of his success, and says it never felt very stable or real.

In 1998, the Hai­nan provincial government introduced a program aimed at putting about 67,000 hectares into coconut cultivation and began seeking growers to carry it out. After attending a couple of information sessions, Wu decided to get out of the shrimp business and put all of the more than RMB50 million he got from the sale of his aquaculture facility into leasing land to grow coconuts.

Wu’s reasoning was that Hainan produced only 100–200 million coconuts per year versus potential mainland Chinese consumption of 2 billion per year.

Recognizing that Hainan’s indigenous coconut varieties take 10–15 years to bear fruit, Wu, with the policy support and approval of the provincial government, imported 1.2 million coconuts from Vietnam, and initiated a test planting of 10,000 of them in Dong­fang City in southwestern Hainan.

The results in the first year were extremely disappointing. “Every tree on an 80-some-kilometer stretch of coast died,” recalls Wu. “We lost more than RMB10 million.” Though Wu was able to identify the problem (the local soil was too dry) and resolve it, he decided to look for land elsewhere. He went on to build a coconut kingdom that sprawled across the Dong­fang, Wen­chang, Dan­zhou, and Wan­ning municipalities, and covered more than 4,000 hectares of land.

But mainland policy changed with the ascension of a new leadership in 2004. The new administration called for abolishing orchards in favor of fish­ponds, and cut his Dong­fang plantation down from 87 km of coastline to just four.

Did the government provide compensation? Wu shakes his head, saying nothing. Not one thin dime? Wu nods.

Even though Wu’s kingdom has since been reduced to a “paltry” 2,000-some hectares, Dong Tai still manages to produce 10 million Vietnamese-variety coconuts per year. As big as that number is, “It’s not even enough to meet Hainan’s internal demand,” says Wu. Meanwhile, the market price of coconuts has soared from just RMB0.5 per coconut a dozen-odd years ago to RMB5 today. Global prices are on the rise, too. “In this industry, we’re not worried about insufficient demand, but about insufficient production,” says Wu.

Taiwanese businessman Hsu Tsung-hsun and his wife Xiao Suzhen have sought to recreate the romantic atmosphere of Gone with the Wind on their Hainan Island plantation.

Hai­nan has sufficient sun, sea, and sandy beaches to support its development into an international tourist destination. But coconuts are an essential part of the tropical atmosphere. Wu sees that atmosphere as the coconut industry’s value added and believes his 2,000 hectares of green plantations have vast potential for tourism.

Wu’s idea—a tourism-oriented farm that features modern recreational amenities—has been tried in Taiwan. He plans to turn his Sun Moon Bay plantation in Wan­ning into an integrated resort with a 10,000-person campground, facilities capable of hosting music festivals, and amenities for travelers who just want to sunbathe on the beach. He predicts he will have it up and running as early as the end of this year.

Wu isn’t alone in his ambitions. Many Taiwanese agribusinesses are chomping at the bit to get into the recreation market. Hsu Tsung-hsun and Xiao Su­zhen, the husband-and-wife owners of ­Zhen’ai Plantation in Hong­hua Village, ­Sanya City, have opened their coffee operation to tourists, showing visitors every step in the coffee production chain, from planting the bushes to roasting the beans. They have also partnered with a Hai­nan-based Taiwanese wedding photographer to bring couples to their plantation for wedding-photo shoots.

Tianya Haijiao wedding photos

The ­Tianya Hai­jiao of mainland songwriter Zheng Nan’s “Come to Tianya Hai­jiao” is actually a scenic hotspot in ­Sanya. In recent years, many of the young couples shooting wedding photos on ­Sanya’s beaches have been dropping by ­Tianya Hai­jiao, the name of which suggests “until the end of the world,” to exchange their vows.

In contrast to the floral splendors described in the song, tree-covered ­Sanya (and Hai­nan as a whole) looks something like a canvas that has been dyed in green ink.

Palms, beaches, and broad seascapes aside, does Sanya offer couples any other scenic options for their wedding photos?

Dou Li is currently the only Taiwanese wedding photo company in ­Sanya. Its owner Deng Rui­feng has partnered with Hsu Tsung-hsun’s Ten-Bridge Agricultural Development to build a “wedding-photo paradise” featuring fields of flowers, fruit trees, pools, pastures, and a wedding chapel on the grounds of Hsu’s ­Zhen’ai Plantation.

Deng explains that Hai­nan’s tropical plant life and ambiance are very attractive to mainlanders, and estimates that more than 90% of ­Sanya’s wedding-photo market consists of mainland couples. A dozen or so couples have already shot their wedding photos on the plantation, which provides “classier” wedding scenery than the typical beach.

Hsu, who designed and administers the plantation, is an experienced planner: he majored in urban planning at university, worked for a time as a technical specialist with the Tai­nan County Bureau of Public Works, and went on to found a construction company. After a visit to Hai­nan in 1994 on an inspection tour, he vowed to his wife that he would recreate Tara, the plantation from the film Gone with the Wind, in ­Sanya. When he founded ­Zhen’ai in 1997, his wife joked that they had planted a veritable army of 80,000 banana trees.

But a 2005 typhoon massacred nearly all of their bananas, prompting the couple to replant in coffee.

Like former Tai­nan County assistant magistrate Lin Wen-ting, the first Taiwanese businessperson to grow coffee on Hai­nan, they chose to cultivate Arabica beans and planted some 60,000 bushes. But they wanted to do more than just grow the coffee. They also wanted their plantation to be steeped in the whole range of coffee culture, from growing the crop to drinking the brew.

To that end, Hsu, who learned how to roast beans from a Taiwanese master of the craft, set up an outdoor area for the cleaning and initial sorting of the beans. If the plantation receives its permit to operate a recreational business, it will be able to provide visitors with a broad array of recreational activities, including shooting wedding photos, picking fruit, and tasting coffee. Hsu also has plans to build a hostel that would enable guests to enjoy a richer overnight experience.

David Hsu, the couple’s eldest son, helps out on the plantation. Having spent years working wineries on Australia’s Gold Coast, the younger Hsu believes that Taiwanese coffee growers on Hai­nan need to target the high end of the market by, for example, adopting the common Western tactic of selling alcoholic beverages as well as coffee.

The story of the Hsu family’s beloved plantation, as well as their ambitious plans for it, has spread widely in Taiwan. This summer, two universities, Chia Nan University of Pharmacy and Science and Wu-feng University, sent dozens of students to the plantation as interns. While learning the business, they will also evaluate the outlook for jobs on Hai­nan after graduation.

But the situation is a bit different for the majority of the well-established Taiwanese agribusinesses on Hai­nan. For them, the biggest obstacle to transforming their businesses or diversifying into agricultural tourism is land.

Wen Zhen­xiong, an official with the Hai­nan branch of the mainland’s Taiwan Affairs Bureau, explains that rezoning is the key to Taiwanese businesses being able to move into agricultural tourism. “The relevant rules are still being set,” he says.

In addition to the incomplete legislative changes, Hai­nan’s Taiwanese businesspeople complain that “local government doesn’t implement the central government’s policies.” For example, one Taiwanese businessperson in ­Sanya got his application to engage in agritourism approved by the city government only to have it stall at the township level. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the situation.

Another says that even if the agritourism laws are approved, he wonders whether Taiwanese businesses will actually earn anything.

But the core problem comes back to the fact that Taiwanese in mainland China don’t really own their land. As one pessimistically observes: “On the one hand, you have local governments that expropriate land. On the other, you have same local governments encouraging Taiwanese businesspeople to go into agricultural tourism. It’s schizophrenic.”

Clearly, there’s no agriculture without land, and no agritourism without agriculture. Does agritourism represent a lifeline for Taiwanese agribusinesses on Hai­nan? Or is it nothing more than an invitation to leap into rough seas without a lifejacket? Time will tell, and likely very quickly.