Ocean Flower Island () is an artificial archipelago located off the northern coast of

Danzhou Danzhou ( zh, t=儋州 , p=Dānzhōu) is a prefecture-level city in the northwest of the Chinese island province of Hainan. The administrative seat and urban center of Danzhou is Nada Town. Danzhou was upgraded from a county-level city into a ...

, a city in

Hainan Hainan is an island provinces of China, province and the southernmost province of China. It consists of the eponymous Hainan Island and various smaller islands in the South China Sea under the province's administration. The name literally mean ...

, China. It was built by the

Evergrande Group The China Evergrande Group was a Chinese property developer, and it was the second largest in China by sales. It was founded in 1996 by Hui Ka Yan (Xu Jiayin). It sold apartments mostly to upper- and middle-income dwellers. Evergrande was i ...

and consists of three islets with a total area of . Construction was mostly completed by 2020, with trial runs for tours beginning on 1 January 2021.

Geography

Ocean Flower Island is an artificial archipelago situated within Yangpu Bay in the Chinese province of

, off the northern coast of

and to the west of the

Yangpu Peninsula The Yangpu Peninsula () is a peninsula located in Danzhou, on the northwestern coast of Hainan Province, China. It has a coastline containing many natural harbors. An expressway connects the peninsula to Haikou, the capital of the province, whi ...

. It consists of three independent islets with a total area of .

History

Plans to create Ocean Flower Island were announced in 2015, and the project received an initial investment of

CN¥ The renminbi ( ; symbol: ¥; ISO code: CNY; abbreviation: RMB), also known as the Chinese yuan, is the official currency of the People's Republic of China. The renminbi is issued by the People's Bank of China, the monetary authority of Chin ...

160 billion (

US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...

24 billion). Construction of the island and its buildings had mostly finished by the end of 2020, and the first trial runs for tours were held on 1 January 2021. Zhang Qi, a provincial Communist Party official who was convicted of corruption in December 2020, had approved

land reclamation Land reclamation, often known as reclamation, and also known as land fill (not to be confused with a waste landfill), is the process of creating new Terrestrial ecoregion, land from oceans, list of seas, seas, Stream bed, riverbeds or lake ...

projects to build the island, in violation of Hainan's environmental protection laws. The construction of the island damaged

coral reefs A coral reef is an underwater ecosystem characterized by reef-building corals. Reefs are formed of colonies of coral polyps held together by calcium carbonate. Most coral reefs are built from stony corals, whose polyps cluster in groups. ...

and

oyster Oyster is the common name for a number of different families of salt-water bivalve molluscs that live in marine or brackish habitats. In some species, the valves are highly calcified, and many are somewhat irregular in shape. Many, but no ...

populations. The boundaries of the protected area around the island were later restored. Over 200,000 people visited the island to celebrate National Day on 1 October 2021. On 30 December 2021, the city of Danzhou ordered the developer Evergrande, which was in the middle of a

liquidity crisis In financial economics, a liquidity crisis is an acute shortage of ''liquidity''. Liquidity may refer to market liquidity (the ease with which an asset can be converted into a liquid medium, e.g. cash), funding liquidity (the ease with which borrow ...

, to demolish 39 of its buildings on the island. The buildings had been built illegally because they violated local planning laws; the company was given ten days to take the buildings down. In a statement, Evergrande said the demolition notice applied only to buildings on plot 2-14-1 located on No. 2 Island, and " idnot involve other plots of land of the Ocean Flower Island project".

References

{{Hainan topics Islands of Hainan Artificial islands of China Buildings and structures in Hainan Buildings and structures under construction in China

Geography

History

See also

References