Hainan desserts in Sanya
qingbuliang, coconut sweets, and a whole island of tropical fruit

The name translates as "cool, nourishing, refreshing", and that is exactly what the bowl delivers. It starts with a base of fresh coconut milk or young-coconut water, naturally sweet and cold, then a dozen-plus things go in: cooked mung beans, red beans, coix barley, lotus seeds, mashed taro, chewy taro balls, cubed black grass jelly, sweet watermelon, ripe mango and clear sago, all crowned with crushed roasted peanuts for a nutty finish. Some stalls float a scoop of coconut-milk ice on top. It is never aggressively sweet, and every spoonful brings a different texture — crunchy, chewy, smooth, cold all at once. One bowl and you understand why Hainan locals eat it every day through the hot months.

Sanya's coconuts are sweet and fresh enough to become ice cream with almost nothing added. The best vendors serve coconut-milk ice cream inside a real coconut shell, then scrape fresh young-coconut flesh over the top so you get both the ice cream and the coconut in one go — cold, creamy, fragrant. The other version you'll spot in the night markets is the fried ice-cream roll (炒冰), where coconut milk or yoghurt is poured onto a frozen steel plate and scraped into curls in front of you, often with chopped fruit folded in. It's half dessert, half performance — kids love it.

Picture a silken tofu pudding made with coconut milk instead of soybean — soft, wobbling, pale and gently sweet, with the natural perfume of fresh coconut. The places that do it well set the jelly back inside a halved coconut and serve it so you can spoon out both the jelly and the tender flesh clinging to the inside. It's cold, smooth and far lighter than coconut ice cream, which makes it the right call when you want something refreshing without feeling heavy. Some shops add a drizzle of syrup or fresh fruit on top. This is a coconut dessert that doesn't try to do much — and is delicious precisely because the coconut is good.

In Sanya, a cold young coconut is the easiest and freshest drink going. Beachfront stalls and market carts keep coconuts piled into hills; the vendor grabs one, takes a few cleaving cuts with a heavy knife and drops in a straw on the spot. Hainan coconut water is just sweet enough and properly cooling. When you've drunk it, ask them to split the coconut in half so you can scrape out the tender flesh — some hand you a spoon for exactly this. It is the cheapest and best way to beat the heat in the city, and the image that stays with everyone who visits Sanya.

Hainan is China's biggest mango producer, and from March to June the markets fill with ripe, fragrant fruit — so the dessert shops run a whole mango menu. There's mango sago in coconut milk (杨枝甘露, the Cantonese-style classic) blending mango purée, sago, pomelo segments and cold coconut milk; mango blended over ice; or simply diced ripe mango drizzled with condensed milk and coconut cream. Hainan mango is intensely sweet and aromatic, and against the richness of the coconut it strikes a nice balance. It's the fresh, easy-going option for anyone who doesn't want their dessert too sweet.

The cart with the spinning press is a familiar sight in Sanya's markets and roadsides — fresh cane stalks fed through the rollers and crushed into a green-gold juice, served over ice straight away. The sweetness is clean and natural, never sticky, and some vendors squeeze in a little lime to brighten it. It's genuinely thirst-quenching in the heat, one of the cheapest drinks around, and the one locals reach for again and again. It also happens to be the perfect companion to a walk through Sanya's fruit markets.

Beyond qingbuliang, Hainan has several cooling jellies you can eat on their own. Grass jelly (凉粉) is a wobbly black or clear jelly, cubed and dressed with brown-sugar syrup; some stalls add beans, taro and fruit, making it a pared-down cousin of qingbuliang. Herbal jelly (龟苓膏, guilinggao) is a jet-black Chinese-herb jelly, faintly bitter-sweet and believed to cool the body's "heat" — it's served with honey or condensed milk to balance the bitterness. Both are light, cold and not too sweet, the kind of thing the Chinese have eaten to beat the heat for generations. Good for a day when you want something cold but restrained.

Hainan is China's tropical-fruit basket, and Sanya sits at its southern tip, so the fruit here is fresher, cheaper and more varied than anywhere else in the country. Walk First Market or a fruit market and you'll find mango (the local king), mangosteen (the queen), dragon fruit with deep-red juicy flesh, golden jackfruit, longan, rambutan, durian (now grown in Sanya), and coconut all year round. Most is sold by weight, and some stalls dice it into bags with a skewer so you can graze across several at once — easy sampling in one spot. Just keep an eye on the scales (see the FAQ at the foot of the page).