Yangjiang's seafood feast captivates international vloggers ahead of fishing season

A thousand tables materialized along the streets of Hailing Island, each one crowded with people—locals and travelers alike—leaning over platters that gleamed with the day's catch. Abalone, sea cucumber, fish maw, squid, shrimp. The seafood was arranged with care, a visual argument for freshness and abundance.

This was no ordinary meal. It was a feast held on the eve of the South China Sea fishing season, which officially opened on August 16, and it carried the weight of centuries. The Tanka people, who have made their lives on the water and in boats for generations, have long observed this custom—gathering before the boats depart to pray for a harvest that will fill their nets and a journey that will bring everyone home. The banquet is ritual and hope compressed into a single evening.

Cassie, a vlogger from Canada, found herself moving through the feast with genuine wonder. She had eaten seafood before, but not like this—not with this variety, not this fresh. She moved from shrimp to octopus to other things she couldn't quite name, each one a small revelation. What struck her as much as the food itself was the effort she could see threaded through every detail. The costumes, the preparations, the way the entire city seemed to have poured intention into the event. She had come to eat. She stayed to witness something older than appetite.

Alongside the feast, performers enacted a traditional Tanka wedding, a ceremony that historically unfolds on boats themselves. Decorated vessels, family members carrying poultry and red dates and other items laden with symbolic meaning—the rituals moved through their prescribed forms while onlookers watched. For Cassie, it was the first time she had seen these traditions anywhere but in description. The gap between reading about something and standing in front of it collapsed.

Billy, a British vlogger visiting Hailing Island for the first time, had heard the place spoken of in reverent tones by people who had lived in China long enough to know what they were recommending. He arrived skeptical, as travelers do. What he found was something that felt like paradise—a beach that held its own against memory, palm trees that looked like they belonged in a postcard, people who treated strangers with genuine warmth. The food was part of it, but not all of it. The island itself was the main course.

Billy had loved seafood since childhood, and he understood the difference between fresh and merely cold. What he tasted on Hailing Island was the former—not just fresh but flavored in a way that suggested the water it came from, the skill of the people who caught it, the care taken in its preparation. He spoke about leaving with a full stomach and a full heart, the kind of phrase that sounds like cliché until you hear someone say it and realize they mean it literally. He meant that the place had changed something in him, however small.

Both vloggers, in their separate ways, had arrived as observers and left as witnesses to something that mattered. They had eaten extraordinary food, yes. But they had also been allowed into a tradition that belonged to people who had earned it through generations of risk and skill and devotion to the sea. The feast, in that sense, was not just about feeding visitors. It was about showing them why the Tanka people gather before the boats leave, why they pray, why they celebrate together. It was about making visible the thing that usually stays hidden—the hope that lives in every departure.