China · Guangdong · Guangzhou
Haizhu District, Guangzhou — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Haizhu District is Guangzhou's island borough on the Pearl River, home of Sun Yat-sen University and Haizhu Wetland.
About Haizhu District
Where to stay in Haizhu District
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Where you stay in Haizhu depends on whether you want the riverfront or the quieter campus streets. The Pazhou exhibition quarter suits business travellers, while the leafy lanes around Sun Yat-sen University draw a slower crowd. Book early during trade-fair weeks.
Each pocket of the island sits within reach of a metro line, so a room near any of them keeps the rest of Guangzhou an easy ride across the Pearl River.
About Haizhu District
What are the main landmarks in Haizhu District?
The island's landmarks lean scholarly and civic. Sun Yat-sen University spreads across the Kangleyuan grounds it inherited from Lingnan University, and its Museum of Biology holds specimens gathered over more than a century of fieldwork. Nearby, the Guangdong Museum of Revolutionary History occupies the site of the Second Guangzhou Uprising cemetery.
Water frames it all. Haizhu National Wetland Park stitches orchards, lakes, and river channels into the largest urban wetland Guangzhou keeps, and it draws migrating birds each winter to the middle of the city.
What is the history of Haizhu District?
Old maps call this island Henan, or Honam, meaning south of the river. For centuries it stood apart from the walled city of Guangzhou across the water, a stretch of orchards, ancestral villages, and riverside temples reached only by boat. Bridges changed that.
When Lingnan University planted its campus at Kangleyuan in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it seeded the scholarly quarter that Sun Yat-sen University later inherited, and the district's fruit gardens gradually gave way to the streets and river wharves that knit Haizhu into the wider city.
Where is Haizhu District?
Haizhu is Guangzhou's only island district, wrapped by branches of the Pearl River on Henan Island, with the tropical wetland at its heart.
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More areas in Guangzhou
Updated July 2026