Indonesian Cultural Village

The Indonesian Cultural Village is a heritage attraction that tells the story of Xinglong's most distinctive demographic: the Nanyang Hua — overseas Chinese who were repatriated from Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and other Southeast Asian countries during the 1950s and 1960s. The village presents traditional music, dance performances, and the food culture these communities brought with them, creating an odd and genuinely interesting hybrid identity that makes Xinglong unlike anywhere else in China.

Performances of Indonesian dance and gamelan-style music run daily for tour groups. The shows are unabashedly commercial, but the underlying story is real and worth understanding. The community's culinary influence survives in Xinglong's restaurants, where coconut milk, Southeast Asian spices, and dishes that have no equivalent elsewhere in Hainan appear alongside standard Cantonese fare. The coffee and food market attached to the cultural village is a good place to buy locally grown coffee and the sticky-sweet rice cakes the returnee community adapted from their original homelands.

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A story
Between 1949 and the 1960s, tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese were expelled or pressured to leave Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries in waves of anti-Chinese violence and discrimination. The Chinese government settled many of these returnees on state-run farms in Hainan, including the Xinglong Overseas Chinese Farm. The community that grew up here retained their Southeast Asian foods, music, and customs while building a new life on a tropical island that, in its heat and vegetation, felt at least a little like home.