Zhanjiang airport and the road to Leizhou: going back, and what to bring

Zhanjiang airport is Zhanjiang Wuchuan International Airport, 湛江吴川国际机场, code ZHA, the three letters on your boarding pass. It stands in Tangdu town in Wuchuan, about 35 kilometres from downtown Zhanjiang, and it opened on 24 March 2022 in place of the old Zhanjiang Airport in Xiashan. As of 20 October 2026, its route list has no direct flight from Malaysia or Singapore. It does have international flights now, to Vientiane in Laos and to Nha Trang in Vietnam. So a family from Kuala Lumpur comes in one of three ways: change planes at a big Chinese airport such as Guangzhou and fly on to Zhanjiang; fly to Guangzhou and take the new high-speed train; or fly to Haikou on Hainan Island and cross the strait by ferry to Xuwen.

Sooner or later, a family that has traced its thread back across the strait wants to stand at the other end of it. This page is about that trip. It also carries some honest news: for most Lui Chew families, the hardest part happens before you book anything.

Before you book anything

Here is the plain truth at the centre of this page, and it is better said early: for most Lui Chew descendants, the trip is not the hard part.

In the written accounts of overseas Chinese families who reached their home village and the people still living there, each search began with a physical clue. A handwritten address on an old envelope. A family book of names kept safe. A photograph of a gravestone. A contact already in the clan network. In one case a Malaysian family found its relatives after three generations of searching that failed, and what opened the door was one handwritten hometown address.

No written account yet tells of anyone starting from a county name alone and finding their village. That does not mean it cannot be done. It may only mean nobody has written it down.

So the honest first question is not “how do I get to Leizhou?” It is this:

Do you have a village?

Not just a county: Haikang, Suixi and Xuwen were large. A named village, town or 乡, a rural district

Do you have the surname in Chinese characters?

A spelling in English letters alone is not enough to match against a family book

Do you have a generation name (字辈)?

A family's generation poem gives each generation one shared character in its names, so a name can be checked against the line

Do you have ancestor names, and a rough year they left?

In characters where you can

If the answer to the first question is no, the most useful trip you can make this year is not to China. It is to a cemetery, and to your oldest living relative, with a phone set to record. How to trace your Lui Chew ancestry, our step-by-step guide, sets out how. In Malaysia, the genealogy forum run by the Centre for Malaysian Chinese Studies (华社研究中心) with FamilySearch, a free family-history website, has covered this exact problem, down to how to read a home village off a gravestone when nobody remembers it.

Getting there

Zhanjiang Wuchuan International Airport (ZHA)

Checked 20 October 2026.

Zhanjiang Wuchuan International Airport is new. It opened on 24 March 2022 in Tangdu town, in Wuchuan, 吴川, a county-level city that Zhanjiang governs. A county-level city is a city with the rank of a county. The old Zhanjiang Airport in Xiashan closed its passenger halls the same day. On 20 February 2024 the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the country’s air authority, renamed it Zhanjiang Wuchuan International Airport. It is about 35 kilometres from downtown Zhanjiang.

Most of its flights are inside China. Domestic flights link Zhanjiang with Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and Kunming, among other cities. Those are the big airports where you change planes, the hubs.

Its international flights are recent. Lao Airlines began flying between Vientiane and Zhanjiang on 23 December 2025, three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Newsgd, the Guangdong government’s English news site, called it the first international service since the move in 2022. Vietjet’s flights between Zhanjiang and Nha Trang in Vietnam came back on 30 April 2026, about two hours each way, by a report the next day from Gelonghui, a Chinese finance news site. Zhanjiang Wuchuan International Airport’s own website ran the first full flight as a headline.

A correction: in July 2026 this page said Zhanjiang Wuchuan International Airport had almost no international service. That undersold it, because the Vientiane flights had already begun.

Is a Kuala Lumpur or Singapore flight coming? We don’t know yet. When the Vientiane route opened, Newsgd reported that the local government and the airport called it part of wider plans for direct flights to more of Southeast Asia, and named Vietnam and Thailand. They did not name Malaysia or Singapore.

Timeline of six changes in the way into Zhanjiang, from the new airport opening in March 2022 to the Nha Trang flights coming back in April 2026, with the high-speed railway and the first international flight in December 2025.

When	What happened
24 Mar 2022	The new airport opens in Wuchuan, replacing the old one in Xiashan
20 Feb 2024	It is renamed Zhanjiang Wuchuan International Airport
17 Jul 2025	Malaysians can enter China without a visa for short visits
22 Dec 2025	The Guangzhou to Zhanjiang high-speed railway opens
23 Dec 2025	First international flight: Lao Airlines from Vientiane
30 Apr 2026	Vietjet flights to Nha Trang in Vietnam come back

Entry: no visa for a short visit

Checked 20 October 2026.

From Malaysia. China Consular Affairs, the Chinese government’s consular notice service, announced that an agreement between China and Malaysia to drop visas both ways took effect on 17 July 2025. Holders of Malaysian ordinary passports, the standard passport most citizens hold, can enter China without a visa for purposes that include tourism, family reunions, visits to friends and private affairs. Each visit can last up to 30 days. Across any 180-day stretch, the days in China can add up to no more than 90. A longer single stay, or work or study, still needs a visa. Two more points held as of 18 July 2026: the passport needs six months’ validity, and the agreement runs for five years and renews by itself.

From Singapore. Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs says that since 9 February 2024, holders of Singapore ordinary passports can stay in China up to 30 days without a visa, under a two-way arrangement between the two countries.

Entry rules can change. Confirm with the Chinese embassy in your country before you book.

Three ways in

With no direct flight from Malaysia or Singapore on the route list as of 20 October 2026, a family gets in one of three ways.

A high-speed railway is a line built only for fast trains. By Xinhua’s figures, this one runs 401 kilometres, at up to 350 kilometres an hour. Tickets are sold on 12306, China Railway’s own booking site, which also shows the fares.

From Singapore, the same three ways apply. Check the airlines’ own schedules for flights to Guangzhou, Shenzhen or Haikou before you plan around them.

Crossing from Haikou to Xuwen

The Xuwen County government counts four ports of Xuwen’s own on the strait: Xuwen Port, 徐闻港; Hai’an Port, 海安港; Hai’an New Port, 海安新港; and the north port of the Guangdong to Hainan railway, where trains cross the strait by ferry. Which boat leaves from which port, when, and for how much, can change, so check close to your trip. Our page on Xuwen County tells the story of the crossing, which is as old as the written record of the place.

What about the new customs rules on Hainan? Since 18 December 2025 the whole island has been a special customs area, a zone with customs rules of its own. The change is aimed at goods for trade. Before it began, an official told the People’s Daily that, apart from some goods headed for the mainland, people and their belongings would cross under the same rules as before. On the first day, Science and Technology Daily added that goods bought from abroad for your own use can be carried back to the mainland as normal, in reasonable amounts and within the duty-free limit. That limit is the value you may bring in without paying tax. So, by our reading, a family’s own luggage should cross the strait as before. Anything you bought duty-free on the island is the thing to check.

A high-speed railway from Zhanjiang to Haikou is planned. It is not built yet.

When to go, and what to set up first

Checked 18 July 2026.

When to go. Typhoon season runs from June into early November. The better times are mid-March to mid-April and mid-October to late November. Qingming, 清明, in early April, is the traditional time to sweep the family graves, and it falls inside the first of those windows. That fits, but it is also one of the busiest travel weeks in China. Book ahead.

Set up before you leave. Set up Alipay and WeChat Pay, China’s two big phone payment apps, before you go: both now take foreign cards, and China runs mostly without cash. Carry some cash anyway, because rural transport, small sellers and temple donation boxes use less of the phone apps than the cities do. Buy a tourist SIM card at the airport you land in; phone signal matters more out in the villages than in Guangzhou. Foreign visitors must be registered with the police within 24 hours of arrival. Hotels do it for you, but a night in a village or a family homestay means you register in person.

The last leg, by road

From the airport. Zhanjiang Wuchuan International Airport’s own website lists an airport express bus, taxis, ride-hailing cars booked through a phone app, and car hire. It is about 35 kilometres to downtown Zhanjiang (20 October 2026). For Leizhou, plan the drive as two legs: the airport to Zhanjiang city, then the city to Leizhou.

From Zhanjiang to the county town. Zhanjiang city to Leizhou City is roughly 57 kilometres, about an hour by road, with frequent buses between the two (18 July 2026). Leizhou City’s hotels are modest and few. Zhanjiang has far more, so most visitors stay there and travel down. There is little English on the ground, and the signs are in Chinese. For the city itself, and why a stone that says only Zhanjiang (湛江) is a wide net, read our page on Zhanjiang and the Lui Chew homeland.

From the county town to the village. This is the hard part of the road. Rural buses are few, and the practical answer is a hired car with a driver, booked through your hotel or a local agent. Allow at least half a day to reach a village beyond the county town (18 July 2026).

What to bring for a village or grave search

The list before you book is about what you know. This one is about what you carry. Most of it comes out of the work that How to trace your Lui Chew ancestry sends you to do at home, so do that first.

• Photographs of every family grave. The whole stone, the hometown line, the names and dates, and the names of the descendants carved along the sides, which map a whole generation in one picture. The hometown line, or jiguan line, names the family's ancestral place in China. Reading the jiguan line shows how to read it.
• The place name, copied exactly. The county and any characters below it, character for character from the stone or the letter, never from a hurried note. A town or village under the county is the prize.
• The names, in characters. Your surname, the generation name, the ancestors' names, and the rough year they left.
• Pictures of the old papers. Qiaopi, 侨批, the letters migrants sent home with money inside, carry the home address, and ancestor tablets often carry generation names and origins on the back. Take photographs and leave the originals safe at home. That last part is our advice, not a rule.
• One printed sheet with all of the above, in large characters. It is something you can hand to an elder or a hall keeper, and leave behind with a way to reach you. This one is our suggestion too.
• Your elders' voices. Bring the recordings you made at home, and a phone ready to record in the village, with permission. A village elder's first language is Leizhou Min, 雷州话, the Min Chinese language of the peninsula, so a recording keeps what you could not follow on the day.
• Small gifts, and some cash. Hospitality is usually returned with hospitality, often gifts for elders and children. Temple donation boxes and village sellers may not take a phone payment.
• A way to write down what you find. Who you met, where, and on what day. Even a search that ends at "Haikang county, village unknown" is worth keeping, so the next relative can start where you stopped.

Alone, on a tour, or with a delegation?

No Leizhou roots tour is on offer. No Malaysian agency, Chinese operator or government programme advertises trips for descendants to Leizhou or Zhanjiang. Nobody has failed here; it is a matter of size. Roots tourism, trips that take descendants to their family’s home place, is well built for Fujian, Chaoshan, Hainan and the Taishan and Wuyi districts, whose people overseas number in the millions. Leizhou’s are a small share of that.

The gap runs deeper than tour packages. Fujian has an official online roots-seeking platform holding more than ten thousand family books in digital form. Zhanjiang’s overseas Chinese offices, the government offices that deal with Chinese people abroad and their home towns, have nothing like it: they publish no roots-seeking service at all. They did help host the World Leizhou Peninsula Friendship Conference. But that is a gathering held every two years for people from the peninsula living overseas, not a service desk for one family.

What is actually there

Leizhou is Guangdong’s only county-level National Historic-Cultural City, a title China gives to towns for their history, and it was the old seat of the prefecture. What a descendant would want to see sits close together. Leizhou City: where it is, and what stands there walks the town itself.

• The Leizhou Ancestor Temple (雷祖祠). Founded in 642 CE for Chen Wenyu, the Tang dynasty prefect who became a god, Lei Zu, the Thunder Ancestor who gave the prefecture its name. It is a national key cultural relic, one of the sites China protects at the highest level. He is not worshipped in Melaka; this is where he stayed. Melaka's Lui Chew keep a different folk god, Bai Ma Lao Shi, the White Horse Master.
• The stone dogs (石狗). The Leizhou Museum holds over a thousand, but perhaps ten thousand more still stand across the peninsula at village gates, in lanes and at the edges of ponds, above all in Xuwen, Suixi and the Leizhou townships. Local heritage opinion favours leaving them where they stand. Seeing one in a village is a different thing from seeing a hall full of them. The Leizhou stone dogs has their story.
• The Hall of Ten Worthies (十贤祠). In Song Garden on the north side of Leizhou's West Lake, it honours ten Song dynasty officials sent here in exile, Kou Zhun and Su Che among them, with a stone tablet written by Wen Tianxiang.
• Sanyuan Pagoda (三元塔). Ming dynasty, 57 metres tall, in the park that also holds the Leizhou Museum.

Living culture is harder to catch. Of the peninsula’s living heritage, only Leizhou opera (雷剧), the local stage opera, is easy to find without planning. More than a hundred troupes give something like thirty thousand shows a year, and folk companies play almost every day. Leizhou songs (雷州歌) are called endangered by the body that protects them. The nuo dance (傩舞) is a real village ritual to drive out bad luck, not a show. One documented troupe began at two in the morning and visited more than fifty households. Its dates follow the lunar calendar around the New Year, change from village to village, and are not published in one place. To see it you need to be there at the right time, with a local contact.

At an ancestral hall

• Make contact before you go. Halls are often locked, and the elders who hold the keys are also the people who hold the family books. Arrive unannounced and you may find a closed door, and nobody there to read the records of the line with you.
• Bow, but think before you kneel. The one clear rule in the general custom: at a hall that is not your own direct line, you may bow, but kneeling is kept for your own ancestors.
• Dress and speak quietly. Plain, modest clothes and a calm manner.
• Expect to be fed. A shared meal after paying respects to the ancestors is a normal part of the day. Hospitality is usually returned with hospitality: gifts for elders and children and, among overseas families who give to their home villages more widely, money toward the upkeep of the hall or the graves.
• Ask before you take photographs. Ancestor tablets, portraits and the inside of a hall are not tourist scenery.
• Bring a local who speaks Mandarin, if you can. Not only for the gap in dialect with the elders, but because a local reads the manners of the place in a way a stranger, however fluent, will not.

What to be careful of

Roots-seeking draws fraud, because it deals in longing and in papers that are hard to check.

• Fake family books. A current wave of scams, reported in Chinese, runs like this. The fraudsters pose as clan association officers, make convincing family books and film of ancestral halls with AI, and recruit overseas clan members through chat groups.
• The fees that keep growing. A free, complete family book is offered. Then come fees to compile it, association dues, and money for the upkeep of the hall.
• Appeals to restore a hall that collect donations for work that never begins.
• Old family books are not always true. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, professional forgers, 谱匠, made family books to order, tying rich families to famous or royal lines. An inherited zupu (族谱, a clan's book of its family line) is evidence, not proof.

The free and official channels are, on the record, the ones that really close cases. Township offices for overseas Chinese help descendants at no charge as part of their job. And a public search feature on a Chinese news platform brought a Malaysian family back together after three generations. None of them can do anything without a first clue, which brings us back to where this page began.

Before you book: one next step

Do the paperwork first. Family and Roots, the site’s section on tracing a Lui Chew family, helps turn a county name on a stone into a village, and that village is what makes the flight worth booking. And if you do make the trip, tell us how it went on the community board, or send a correction to anything on this page. The next family will start from what you found.