Current Time in Nada, China

Nada is the central town and seat of government of Danzhou, a city in the north-west of Hainan, China's tropical island province in the South China Sea. It lies a little inland from the coast, roughly a hundred kilometres south-west of the provincial capital Haikou, in a landscape of low hills, rubber plantations and reservoirs. Around a quarter of a million people live in the town, which serves as the commercial and administrative centre for a municipality of nearly a million.

Danzhou has a distinguished place in Chinese cultural history. In 1097 the great Song dynasty poet, calligrapher and statesman Su Shi, known as Su Dongpo, was banished here, then regarded as the remotest edge of the empire. Rather than despair, he taught local students, wrote some of his finest late work and is credited with promoting learning on the island; the first Hainanese scholar to pass the imperial examinations was among those he influenced. The academy founded in his memory at Zhonghe, a short distance from Nada, is the region's most important historic site, with courtyards, halls, ancient trees and a museum of his life.

The area is also known as a land of poetry and song. Danzhou villages have a centuries-old tradition of composing verse for festivals and competitions, and the local tiaosheng singing, in which groups of men and women exchange improvised verses in call and response, is recognised as national intangible cultural heritage and performed on a huge scale during the lunar new year.

Modern Nada owes much to rubber. From the 1950s the region became the heart of China's natural rubber industry, and the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences and the tropical agriculture campus of Hainan University are based in the town, making it a national centre for research into rubber, coconut, pepper, mango, coffee and other tropical crops. Their experimental gardens and botanical collections are open to visitors and are among the finest in the country.

Elsewhere in the municipality lie the beaches and salt flats of Yangpu, the Songtao reservoir, Hainan's largest, set among forested hills and popular for boating, and the sea-eroded rock formations and fishing harbours of the western coast. The Yangpu economic zone, with its container port and petrochemical complex, is a pillar of the Hainan Free Trade Port and has brought rapid industrial growth to the district.

The climate is warm all year, with a rainy summer and typhoon season and a mild dry winter that draws visitors from northern China. Local specialities include Danzhou rice noodles, coffee, dried squid and tropical fruit.

The high-speed railway that circles Hainan has a station serving the city, and an expressway reaches Haikou in about an hour.

History, tropical agriculture and coastal scenery make Nada an appealing and distinctive corner of Hainan.