About 15km west of Tianya Haijiao on local transport, past a luxurious golf course, is YAZHOU , formerly one of Hainan's biggest towns but now more of a bottleneck for through traffic. It's chiefly known as the place where the thirteenth-century weaver Huang Daopo fled from her native Shanghai to escape an arranged marriage. After forty years living with the coastal Li, she returned to northern China in 1295 and introduced their superior textile techniques to the mainland. Get out when you see the reconstructed Ming city gate , and walk through it to a tiny Taoist temple museum , which includes traditional Li clothing and a Muslim Hui headstone and mosque oil lamp. The Hui have been on Hainan for several centuries and the countryside hereabouts is peppered with their distinctive cyclindrical graves. There's also a big mosque just north of Sanya. Walk back onto the main road and continue a kilometre or so west out of town, and you'll find a four-hundred-year-old, seven-storey brick pagoda leaning at a rakish angle next to a school - one of the few genuinely old structures on the island. The last direct transport back to Sanya leaves in the late afternoon.