Hainan’s coast has no shortage of reasons to keep driving: fishing towns, volcanic shoreline, long beaches, headlands and stretches of road where the island feels far less developed than its resort image suggests.

Lighthouses offer another way to join those places together.

A circuit from Haikou down the east coast and back up the west takes in six very different structures, from a 72-metre modern tower at Mulan Bay to a Ming-era stone lighthouse built from basalt and a 19th-century steel lighthouse at Lingao.

The route is:

Haikou → Mulan Bay → Boao → Shenzhou Peninsula → Yulinjiao → Xisha Stone Lighthouse → Lingao Cape → Haikou

The appeal is not simply the lighthouses themselves. Each stop opens onto a different part of the island.

1. Mulan Bay Lighthouse, Wenchang

Mulan Bay Lighthouse is the natural first stop from Haikou.

Built in 1995, the tower rises 72.12 metres and has a nominal range of 25 nautical miles. It stands on Hainan’s northeastern coast, where the Qiongzhou Strait opens towards the South China Sea. 

What makes Mulan Bay particularly useful for a road trip is that there is now more here than the lighthouse.

The Mulan Bay Lighthouse Cultural Station began trial operations in May 2025. By June, the site included a lighthouse museum, observation hall, cultural-products area, café and sea-viewing platform. 

That turns what might otherwise have been a quick photo stop into somewhere worth spending some time.

2. Boao Lighthouse, Qionghai

Boao’s lighthouse is much newer.

The present tower entered service in 2011 and has a nominal range of 22 nautical miles. Published height figures vary depending on the reference point used, but roughly 75 metres gives a reasonable sense of its scale. 

It is also one of the easier stops on this route.

The lighthouse can be seen clearly from the public road, and there is street parking nearby. You do not need access to the lighthouse compound to appreciate it.

The setting is very different from Mulan Bay. Boao is more developed, with hotels, restaurants and the town close at hand, so it works equally well as a short stop or somewhere to break the journey.

3. Shenzhou Peninsula Lighthouse, Wanning

The red-and-white tower at Shenzhou Peninsula is one of the most distinctive landmarks on the route.

It stands at the end of a long breakwater on the Wanning coast, with open sea on one side and the developed peninsula behind it. State-media reporting has described visitors walking along the breakwater to reach the base of the structure.

This is primarily a landscape and photography stop: a long sea wall, a narrow line into the water and a lighthouse standing at the end of it.

A visitor report from January 2026 described a walk of more than two kilometres from the parking area, with a shuttle operating at the time. Those arrangements can change, so they are better treated as tentative rather than a permanent feature of the site.

4. Yulinjiao Lighthouse, Dongfang

Yulinjiao marks the shift from Hainan’s east coast to the much less developed western side of the island.

The lighthouse stands on Yulinzhou in Dongfang, overlooking the approaches to Basuo Port. It was first built in 1957 and has a reported nominal range of 18 nautical miles.

The lighthouse serves vessels entering and leaving Basuo Port and shipping using the western coastal route around Hainan.

The setting is the real attraction for drivers. Yulinzhou projects into the sea, with rocky coastline on one side and beach on the other, giving the lighthouse a much more exposed feel than the towers at Boao or Mulan Bay.

5. Xisha Stone Lighthouse, Danzhou

The fifth stop is unlike anything else on the route.

Xisha Stone Lighthouse, 细沙灯塔, sits on Danzhou’s volcanic coast. Instead of concrete or steel, the structure is built from blocks of basalt.

Hainan Daily reports that it dates back to the Ming dynasty and that for centuries it helped guide coastal fishermen home and that the tower has been included as a Hainan provincial protected cultural-relic.

There are stories linking the lighthouse to beacon fires and the local salt trade, a Ming-era lighthouse structure built from basalt on Hainan’s volcanic west coast.

6. Lingao Cape Lighthouse

Lingao Cape provides a strong historical finish to the circuit.

The lighthouse is the only one on this route with national-level cultural-heritage protection. It was included in the seventh batch of Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level, approved by the State Council in 2013.

Its history reaches back to the late nineteenth century. Sources date its construction to 1893 and its completion to 1894.

The lighthouse itself is a cylindrical iron or steel structure, very different in appearance from the tall concrete towers at Mulan Bay and Boao. It stands within the wider historical landscape around Hainan Liberation Park.

That makes Lingao more than a final lighthouse stop. It is also an opportunity to spend some time at one of the island’s better-known historical sites before turning east towards Haikou.

Turning the six stops into a road trip

Mulan Bay combines a working lighthouse with a new visitor facility. Boao is an easy roadside stop. Shenzhou Peninsula is about the breakwater and the coastal setting. Yulinjiao feels more exposed and distinctly west-coast. Xisha is the historical outlier, built from volcanic stone. Lingao closes the route with a nationally protected 19th-century lighthouse on the last leg back to Haikou.