Chinese Poet Su Dongpo and Hainan

Chinese poet Su Dongpo (苏东陂) was the most famous of many officials exiled in Hainan in the old days. He reportedly spent three years (1097 - 1100) on the island province near the end of his life.

Writing in the 1940s, Su's modern biographer Lin Yutang (林语堂) noted that Hainan "was all but uninhabitable from the Chinese point of view. The climate was very damp, oppressive in summer and foggy in winter. During the autumn rains everything grew mouldy, and Su once saw a great number of white ants dead on his bedposts ... (and remarked) "How can a human being, who is not made of rocks or metals, stand this for long?"

Su's western exile was said to be physically hard to endure, and at times he had nothing to eat but vegetable soup. Even rice had to be imported from the mainland.

He wrote: "We eat here without meat, get sick without medicine, seek shelter without houses, go out without friends, go through winter without charcoal, and through summer without cold springs. I cannot enumerate all the things we have to do without."