Chengmai

Chengmai is a county of roughly half a million people on the northern coast of Hainan, immediately west of Haikou and only about thirteen kilometres from the provincial capital by high-speed rail. It has become one of the most economically interesting corners of the island: the Hainan Ecological Software Park in Laocheng town is the main base of the province's digital economy, hosting thousands of registered firms working in blockchain, digital culture, digital health and finance, and it sits at the heart of the Hainan Free Trade Port project. Alongside that runs a genuinely old agricultural economy - Fushan coffee, grown from robusta stock brought over from Java more than eighty years ago and now a protected geographical indication served at state banquets, plus Qiaotou sweet potatoes, Chengmai fu-oranges and Bailian geese. Chengmai has no full university of its own and students commute to Haikou for Hainan University and the province's other campuses, but the county is famous across China for something else entirely: certified as a 'Chinese Longevity Township' in 2009 and as the country's first UN-recognised 'World Longevity Township' in 2012, it is a place where an unusual number of residents pass a hundred, and where visitors come as much for the slow village life of Luoyi and the coffee houses of Fushan as for the Song-dynasty Meilang Twin Pagodas.