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
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.