The lift takes thirty-eight seconds to reach the twenty-third floor and the doors open onto a corridor that smells of new carpet and salt, and then the window at the end of it does the thing that makes the whole building worth its existence. 清澜 Qīnglán bay is below you in one piece — the inlet, the bridge, the long green arm of 东郊 Dōngjiāo on the far side with its coconut groves, and beyond that the strait and, on a clear morning, the pale smudge of the mainland. I put my bag down in the corridor and stood there for two minutes like an idiot with my key card in my hand.
文昌 Wénchāng is not a city that builds upward. It is a county-level town on the north-east coast of 海南 Hǎinán where most of the architecture is four storeys of tile and a shop on the ground floor, and the sky is a very large feature of daily life. This tower is the exception, and it works precisely because it is the exception: from the upper floors you can see the geography of the whole area at once, which is genuinely useful, because Wenchang’s coast is a puzzle of inlets and headlands that makes no sense from the road.
The Building and the Bay
The tower stands on the western shore of the 清澜 inlet, a few minutes from the port and the 清澜大桥 Qīnglán Dàqiáo, the bridge that hops across to the 东郊 peninsula. It is a modern, glass-fronted block with a podium at the bottom holding a lobby, a couple of restaurants and a pool deck, and the rooms above are arranged so that everything above the tenth floor has water in its window. Ask for an odd-numbered room. The even ones face the town and the hills, which are perfectly nice hills, but you did not come here for hills.
The pool is on the podium roof rather than the top of the tower, which I initially found disappointing and then decided was the correct decision, because an infinity edge at podium height sits level with the bay and reads as though the water continues. In the late afternoon the whole deck is a long silver sheet and the bridge is a line of lit dots crossing it.
The lobby runs on island time. Check-in is theoretically at two and will happen whenever the room is ready, and nobody will be embarrassed about it. There is tea in a thermos on a side table that is always full, and if you sit down with a cup somebody will come and tell you what to eat in town, at length, whether or not you asked.
Rooms and Floors
The inventory is what you would expect from a tower: doubles and twins stacked in a grid, with a handful of larger corner rooms and a couple of suites on the top two floors. What is not standard is the light. Wenchang is at eighteen degrees north and the sun goes down early and fast, so a room facing west over the inlet gets an hour of low orange light across the water that a room facing east simply does not have.
Two things are worth knowing before you book. First, the tower is close to the port, which means the bay below you is a working harbour rather than a swimming beach — there are fishing boats, there is the odd container, and there is no sand in front of the hotel. The nearest decent beach is a short drive away. Second, the upper floors are quiet and the lower floors are not, because the podium is where the weddings and the company dinners happen, and Hainanese celebrations are enthusiastic. If you are a light sleeper, go high and go away from the podium side.
Eating Below
The hotel restaurants are competent and overpriced in the way hotel restaurants are everywhere, and the far better plan is to walk out of the lobby and find the seafood places along the port road, where the tanks hold whatever came in that morning and you point at things. 文昌 Wénchāng is the home of 文昌鸡 Wénchāng jī, the island’s famous chicken, and there are half a dozen serious chicken restaurants within a ten-minute drive. There is also excellent 糟粕醋 zāopò cù, the sour rice-vinegar soup of the north coast, and a bowl of it at a place with plastic stools is a better meal than anything you will eat upstairs.
Practicalities
Price. Double rooms with a bay view run roughly ¥450–700 a night in the low and shoulder seasons and ¥800–1,400 over 春节 and the first week of October. Corner rooms and the top-floor suites go from about ¥1,200. Rates include breakfast, which is a large Chinese buffet with an egg station and a noodle station and is worth getting up for.
Address. Western shore of the 清澜 (Qīnglán) inlet, 文昌 (Wénchāng), north-east 海南 (Hǎinán) — a few minutes by car from 清澜港 (Qīnglán port) and the 清澜大桥 (Qīnglán Dàqiáo), and about twenty minutes from 文昌 (Wénchāng) high-speed rail station. The taxi drivers at the station know it; tell them 清澜 and they will take you to the port road and you can point.
Rooms. Doubles, twins, corner rooms and a small number of suites over twenty-plus floors. Ask for a high floor on the bay side. The tower has a pool deck with a bar, a gym, and parking underneath; it does not have a beach of its own, and there is no easy swimming in the inlet itself.
Getting there. 海口美兰国际机场 (Hǎikǒu Měilán airport) has its own high-speed rail station on the island’s east loop line, and 文昌 (Wénchāng) is the next stop along — about twenty minutes, which makes this one of the more absurdly easy long-haul arrivals in China. From 文昌 station it is a fifteen- to twenty-minute drive to 清澜. Coming by road from 海口 (Hǎikǒu) it is roughly an hour and a half, or less if you take the 海文大桥 (Hǎiwén Dàqiáo) route across the top of the island.
flowcloud would say that the correct way to arrive in an unfamiliar coastal town is to get high up first and look at it, and that a tower with a view of the whole inlet is worth the two hundred yuan more than a courtyard room with a nicer bed.
Where to stay: Qinglan Bay Tower Hotel, western shore of the 清澜 (Qīnglán) inlet, 文昌 (Wénchāng), north-east Hainan. Doubles from about ¥450 with a bay view, rising to ¥800–1,400 over 春节 and the October holiday; suites from ¥1,200. Twenty minutes by high-speed rail from 海口美兰 (Hǎikǒu Měilán) airport and then a short taxi, or an hour and a half by road from 海口. Ask for a high floor on the odd-numbered side, which is the side with the water, eat your seafood down at the port rather than in the building, and go up to the pool deck for the last hour of the day.