母瑞山 Mǔruì shān is a forested range of more than a hundred square kilometres in the south of Ding’an county, and its importance is not scenic but chronological: the Communist movement on Hainan twice kept itself alive here when the towns had been lost. The memorial park, 母瑞山革命根据地纪念园 Mǔruì shān gémìng gēnjùdì jìniànyuán, stands at 翰林镇 Hàn lín zhèn about 50 km from the county seat, and the surrounding red tourism area was rated national 4A in June 2021, the first red-tourism 4A area in Hainan. In 1928 about six hundred people came up this mountain; in April 1933 twenty-five walked out.
The first retreat followed a defeat. In February 1928 the island’s peasant force was renamed the Qiongya workers’ and peasants’ Red Army, and the movement had by then grown to more than 1,400 soldiers. In mid-March the Guangdong authorities sent 蔡廷锴 Cài Tíngkǎi with more than four thousand troops, the counter-encirclement failed, and on 12 August the Qiongya soviet government was set up with 王文明 Wáng Wénmíng as its chairman. At the end of that year he brought 130-odd Red Army men and the soviet’s own organs, more than six hundred people in all, up to 母瑞山, where they cleared land and established three farms.
The command structure nearly died in the same year, and its rescue is the reason this mountain matters. The special committee’s offices in Haikou were destroyed in February and again in July 1929 and two of its leaders were killed; that August, on 内洞山 Nèi dòng shān in Ding’an, 王文明 called a conference of delegates that elected a new provisional committee of nine including himself and 冯白驹 Féng Báijū, abandoned the strategy of concentrating on the cities. 王文明 died on this mountain on 17 January 1930 and 冯白驹 took up the flag he would carry until 1950.
The second retreat was worse. In July 1932 the Guangdong authorities sent 陈汉光 Chén Hànguāng with more than three thousand troops, and when the second encirclement succeeded 冯白驹 took more than a hundred people back into the mountain and held out for more than eight months. By the end of 1932 the hundred had become twenty-six; in April 1933 twenty-five broke out and made their way back to Changtai village in Qiongshan county, one having been killed in the fighting. The enemy blocked every path, the grain ran out and the force lived on wild vegetables and small fish, with neither salt nor oil, and many of the men went down with night blindness and dropsy. Nobody ran and nobody defected.
The park on the site is a compact group of buildings with more than ten marked sites behind it. The plan covers 130 mu and holds bronze statues of 王文明 and 冯白驹 in Red Army uniform with pistols at their belts; the main hall is a two-storey building of 1,968.68 square metres with two side halls of 751.8 square metres each. Among the sites marked and paved to are the offices of the special committee and the soviet government, the Red Army divisional headquarters, the armoury, the military school, the farms and the hospital. The site opened on 1 August 1996, and the propaganda department made it a national patriotic education base in June 2001. It also marks a meeting nobody expects: on 15 March 1939 冯白驹 and the resistance heroine 刘秋菊 Liú Qiújú came to 翰林镇 to negotiate with 王毅 Wáng Yì, the Nationalist commander on Hainan, and the two sides agreed to fight Japan together.
Practicalities
Tickets. No official notice of a ticket price or an opening time has been found from the county or the site, so what follows is third-party. The travel platforms list the memorial park at zero yuan, meaning no charge, with the note that opening times should be confirmed with the site; the number to ring is 0898-63830815. This is a publicly funded memorial, so free entry is the near-certain outcome, but nobody has published it.
Opening hours. No official timetable is published either. Third-party platforms show the park as normally open and tell visitors to check with the site, which for a memorial of this kind usually means daytime hours; the practical rule is to arrive in the morning and plan to be gone before the light fails, since the access road is a mountain road. Two to three hours covers the main hall, the two side halls and the statues; add half a day for the scattered sites, best in the dry months from November to March.
Closing day. No closing day is reported and none is published. What shapes the calendar is the traffic rather than the gate: the memorial is a study destination for schools, party branches and the cadre academy, so it fills on weekdays in term time and around anniversaries and empties at other times, and village festivals can close the roads for a morning. Nobody has published a rest day, so if a Monday visit matters, telephone first.
Getting there. The mountain is 50 km from the county seat at 翰林镇 and the last stretch is a mountain road, so driving is the practical answer and a chartered car from the county town is the advice repeated by every guide. Public transport is thin: from 10 January 2026 an intercity line runs from Mingzhu Square in Haikou to Zhongrui farm, through Wenbi Peak, Nanli Lake’s Huanle Bay, Longmen, Lingkou and Hanlin, and the return times are earlier than visitors expect.
Come with the sequence in your head rather than the slogans, because the sequence is what this place teaches: six hundred up in 1928, twenty-six left in 1932, twenty-five out in 1933, and the state that was built out of them in 1950. The park is small and its exhibits are conventional, but the mountain behind it is the exhibit, and an hour on the trails explains more than the labels do. Two cautions. The address given by the website, the Tabei road in the county town, is the office of the managing body and not the memorial, which is at 翰林镇 on the Zhongrui farm. And the listed ticket price you may see, zero yuan, is a third-party entry rather than an official announcement.
Getting there: 母瑞山革命根据地纪念园 stands at 翰林镇 on the Zhongrui farm in the south of 定安县, about 50 km from the county seat on a mountain road and best reached by chartered car; the Mingzhu Square to Zhongrui intercity line has called at Zhongrui since 10 January 2026; no official ticket price or hours are published, the third-party listing is free entry at a zero-yuan price, no closing day is reported, and the site telephone is 0898-63830815.