When monkeying around pays off

By Huang Yiming, Zhang Huan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-23 13:14

The monkey islet in Hainan is a big tourist attraction.

Traditional Chinese culture and folklore abound with monkey figures. From the ancient monkey totem to the legendary Monkey King, mischievous monkeys have always been popular. Now we even have an entire islet reserved for these animals.

In Lingshui county, Hainan province, there is Nanwan Monkey Islet, whose residents include more than 1,000 macaques. Macaques have lived on the islet for nearly 300 years and are now under State protection.

Nanwan Monkey Islet used to be one of the biggest tourist attractions in Hainan. It reached its heyday in the 1990s, when 200,000 tourists visited annually. But for a period after that, tourism declined because of rigid and backward management.

When Dai Guofu, president of the Nanwan Monkey Islet Tourism Development Co Ltd, was on a trip to the islet in 1995, he didn't expect to see the once hustling islet on the verge of closure.

Dai, confident about the prospects of this tropical island macaque natural reserve, succeeded in introducing new investments. A 2,138-m-long cable car was built in 1999 to facilitate travel from Lingshui county to the monkey islet. It only takes six minutes to travel over and the number of tourists has increased from 50,000 to almost 1 million over the past decade.

"We do not sell the ecological environment. We do not sell macaques. We sell fun," Dai says.

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