Perhaps the best scene from Sanya this month did not happen at a beach resort. It happened in a school music room, where an American teacher named Dallas, fourteen years into playing the guqin, was showing a group of Italian teenagers how to pluck the seven strings of one of China’s oldest musical traditions, long associated with scholars and the literati.

An American, teaching Chinese classical music, to Italians, on a tropical island. If you wanted one image of what Hainan is quietly becoming, this might be it.

Two weeks, twenty seven Italian students on a tropical Island

The students, 27 of them aged 13 to 18 plus three teachers, arrived at the Shanghai International Studies University Sanya Affiliated Middle School on 2 July for a two week exchange supported by the Hainan Provincial Foreign Affairs Office and organised by the school together with the Hainan branch of China News Service (Beijing) International Communication Group. The school covers accommodation, meals and local transport, so for participating families in Italy, the whole thing costs little more than the flights.

The programme covers a lot of ground in two weeks. On the first full day they painted cherries in ink on rice paper, most of them holding a Chinese brush for the first time.

Then came paper cutting and hanfu, trying on robes from the Wei, Tang and Ming dynasties alongside Li and Miao dress from here in Hainan.

On 6 July they went out into the city: Tianya Haijiao, Luhuitou at sunset, and a Li culture park where an elderly Li weaver demonstrated brocade work that UNESCO lists as intangible cultural heritage.

The students tried the bamboo pole dance, used newly learned Mandarin to ask the price of coconuts, and discovered wampee fruit dipped in salt, which by all accounts converted most of the group on the spot.

Then came lion dancing, with a lion head weighing about two kilos, which feels light enough until it has been held overhead through a full round of footwork. The students learned the basic steps first, then took turns under the head, making it rear and blink in the mirrored dance studio.

Why Italy keeps coming back

This is not a one off. The connection between Sanya and Tuscany goes back more than a decade, and it started, of all places, in the yacht industry. Sanya’s Visun Group and yacht-industry partners from Tuscany launched a joint yacht repair and refit venture in 2013, the two cities became official sister cities in 2015, and when SYFLS opened in 2020 it built its own partnership with schools in Arezzo. Around sixty Italian students and teachers came for a similar programme in 2024. This summer's group is the second confirmed cohort.

The group is due to complete the programme on 14 July. Since leaving the Sanya classrooms, the students have also visited Haikou and Wuzhishan, including Qilou Old Street, the Wuzhishan rainforest and Maona village.