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BEIHAI , a pleasant town situated on the Beibu Gulf some 150km from Nanning on the south coast of Guangxi, was adopted from neighbouring Guangdong Province in 1954 so that Guangxi would have a viable seaport. It got going in the late nineteenth century when the British signed the Yantai Trading Agreement with the Qing court, and grew swiftly as Europeans set up schools, churches, offices and banks. A bland four-hour train ride from Nanning or an overnight ride on the ferry from Hainan Island , Beihai's importance as a trading centre for the southwest is now being realized, and the city is expanding again.

While the only reason to visit Beihai is in transit to Hainan, there's no problem filling in time between connections. The older part of town is along the seafront and on Zhongshan Lu , where mouldering colonial buildings add to the sleepily tropical atmosphere. It's best in the morning when the fresh catches arrive, and there's a fabulous fish market here selling every type and part of sea life imaginable. Hop on a #2 bus heading west down Haijiao Lu from the end of Zhongshan Lu and you end up a couple of kilometres away at the harbour , packed with scores of wooden-hulled junks, motorized and sailless, but otherwise traditionally designed. Most of the vessels here belong to the community of thirteen thousand refugee " boat people " living in the adjacent UN-sponsored village. They were victims of an attempt by the Vietnamese authorities to remove ethnic Chinese from their territory, a major cause of the 1979 war between China and Vietnam. China's reciprocal group are the Jing , ethnic Vietnamese who settled islands off Beihai in the sixteenth century.