The road into Shihan opens onto a high basin between Limu Mountain and Yinggeling. Hainan Daily places the village in Hongmao Town, between Limu Mountain and Yinggeling, at more than 800 metres above sea level. Its scene is built from close elements: forest, a clear stream, rice paddies and houses, with cloud moving through the basin. The report calls Shihan a Li and Miao co-inhabited village. That description matters more than the later online nickname, because it locates the settlement and its people before turning the village into an image for visitors.
From the journal
Dahan, Then Shihan: A Village Found Twice
A village name in an 1841 gazetteer and a scholar's 2011 return along a late-Qing travel route frame Shihan's changing place in Hainan's central mountains.
In the same city · Qiongzhong ↗A basin between two mountain names
The gazetteer wrote Dahan
The oldest written trace identified by the report is not the present name. In the 1841 Daoguang edition of the Qiongzhou Gazetteer, the village appears as Dahan. The article uses the old name to open a question about how a village enters the record: through an administrative gazetteer, through a traveler's route, or through the lives of residents who may not have left written accounts of their own. The 1841 gazetteer is the earliest written appearance of Shihan’s older name identified in Hainan Daily’s account.
A 2011 return along a late-Qing route
In 2011, Hainan University professor Xin Shibiao was translating Hainan Ji Xing, the travel account of the late-Qing American missionary. He retraced the route stop by stop and reached Dahan. The missionary had described the scenery and the people favorably; Xin's visit brought him face to face with a different present: residents still living with hardship and many deteriorating mud-brick houses. This return is the article's human hinge. A place once seen by a traveler was revisited not to repeat his picturesque view, but to compare what a book remembered with what village life looked like more than a century later.
A livelihood is not a timeless label
The newspaper says the translated book was published the following year and that provincial departments then raised three million yuan for development work in Shihan. A later account records 22 homestays, mountain tea and medicinal plants, while coffee remained a proposed future crop at the time. Read this way, Shihan's story is neither an untouched-village idyll nor a simple tourism success tale. It is a record of how a route, a book, public intervention and residents' livelihood choices met in one highland settlement.