About Nigel Marven's Hainan Adventure

Naturalist and broadcaster Nigel Marven jets off to China's smallest republic, Hainan, on a mission to get up close and personal with some of the world's rarest animals.

Nigel Marven's Hainan Adventure

Separated from Guangdong's Leizhou Peninsula by the Qiongzhou straight, Hainan's 33,920 square-kilometre land mass is full of jungle, mountains, amazing coastline and boasts a tropical, monsoonal climate.

Nigel in Haikou rickshaw

Nigel in Haikou rickshaw

It also plays hosts to an incredible and unusual array of wildlife, from the Hainan Moonrat and endangered Hainan Peacock-pheasant to the black-crested gibbon and the indigenous Hainan hare.

In Nigel Marven's Hainan Adventure, Nigel searches the jungles of the island for the incredibly rare golden-furred, black-crested ape – less than 20 of these Hainan gibbons remain.

On his quest he visits Monkey Island, home to over 2,000 rhesus monkeys, dives in a surreal submerged village with sharks and sea kraits, meets a gigantic shrew that lives in houses, faces off with a five-metre king cobra and encounters some of the strangest frogs on earth.

It's a world that western eyes don't often get to see, but Nigel treads into the Chinese jungle to reveal the unknown habitat.