After spending months basking in sunshine in tropical Hainan, China’s southernmost province, Yan Wenling is packing her bags for a trip to Beijing.

Spring is bringing warmer days to north China, including the country’s capital, and Yan’s daughter and family are looking forward to the arrival of the 62-year-old retiree. But her stay will be brief. In a few months’ time, with the approach of the summer heat, she will embark on another leg in her annual migration, heading for the small town in Inner Mongolia where she spent her working life.

In the autonomous region to the northwest of Beijing, Yan expects to spend the refreshingly cool summer tending her tiny vegetable garden. As her cucumbers and tomatoes run to seed, she will complete the travel cycle with a six-hour flight to Hainan’s Sanya, over 3,000 kilometers from Inner Mongolia. 

Mrs Yan is one of a growing number of older Chinese moving around the country chasing pleasant weather in their golden years. Sanya is a favorite destination for this group.

According to a recent survey by the Non-Local Retirees' Association in Sanya, the city of less than a million people is home to about 400,000 retirees like Yan. From late autumn to early spring, elderly people arrive in droves from China's northern regions. The great majority come from Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and the northeast provinces, with a few starting their trips in South Korea or Russia's Far East.

In its winter months, Sanya, renowned for its salubrious tropical climate, now sees its beaches, parks and streets swarming with silver-haired folk. While some choose to lie back and enjoy their leisure time, others prefer more active and profitable pursuits, setting up hair-cut stalls on pavements, painting ink wash pictures in hotel lobbies, or hacking at coconuts and durians for shoppers in the supermarkets.

In contrast to the freezing temperatures in their hometowns, the retired northerners have found Sanya’s 30 degrees Celsius in winter a significant improvement. 

The trend for retirement migrations is unlikely to slow in an aging China. According to government statistics, at the end of 2016, the number of people over the age of 60 on the Chinese mainland stood at 230 million, nearly 17 percent of its total population. The figure was 2 percent higher than in 2014, and it is expected to rise further in the years to come.

China has been on a major drive to develop Hainan as a tourist destination, and the province’s government is trying to adapt its services in response to the growing presence of senior citizens. Nearly 40 hospitals in Hainan, with five in Sanya, are offering social security-covered medical services to non-local residents.

During the Spring Festival holidays in January, Yan Wenling hosted her daughter's family for a two-week vacation in Sanya. For Yan and her husband, Sanya is like a second hometown, vastly preferable to her daughter's cramped apartment in Beijing, if not yet as familiar and intimate as Inner Mongolia.