Own this commemorative coin from the People's Republic of China, issued in 2025 to celebrate Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park — home to one of the world's rarest primates, a mountain that gave the island its soul, and a forest that survived when almost everything around it didn't.

Coin Characteristics

• Varieties: Single variety, 2025
• Composition: Bimetallic — copper-nickel center in brass ring
• Obverse: National emblem of the People's Republic of China; inscription 中华人民共和国 (People's Republic of China); date 2025
• Reverse: Natural scenery of the park featuring Hainan gibbons, Hainan peacock-pheasants, Wuzhi Mountain, and the Wanquan River; inscription 海南热带雨林国家公园 (Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park); denomination 10元
• Edge: Reeded
• Orientation: Medal alignment (↑↑)
• Technique: Milled
• Weight: 9.2 g
• Diameter: 27 mm
• Thickness: 2.1 mm
• Mintage: 50,000,000
• Mints: Shanghai Mint Co. Ltd. (上海造币有限公司) and Shenyang Mint (1984–date)
• Issuing entity: People's Bank of China (中国人民銀行)
• Demonetized: No — current legal tender
• Currency: Renminbi (1955–date)
• Series: China National Park series

About China

• Capital: Beijing (city pop ~22 million; metro pop ~24 million, UN 2023) — similar to Shanghai or the New York metro
• Population: ~1.41 billion (UN 2023) — the most populous country on earth until recently surpassed by India
• Area: 9,596,960 km² (~3,705,407 mi²) — similar in size to the United States
• GDP per capita at PPP: ~$23,400 USD (IMF 2023) — ranks ~73rd out of 193 globally
• Main exports: Electronics, machinery, textiles, steel, chemicals, rare earth materials
• Borders: Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, North Korea — 14 land borders, more than any other country
• Official languages: Standard Chinese (Mandarin / Putonghua)
• Spoken languages: Cantonese (~6%), Wu (Shanghainese) (~6%), Min (Hokkien/Teochew) (~5%), Hakka (~4%), Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian, and dozens of other regional languages and dialects
• Sovereignty:
  • Imperial China — successive dynasties from ~221 BCE
  • Republic of China (1912–1949)
  • People's Republic of China (1 October 1949–date) — this coin issued during this period

China Unfiltered

• The Hainan gibbon on this coin is the rarest primate on earth — with fewer than 40 individuals remaining, all living in this one park. It is not endangered. It is beyond endangered. It exists at the edge of extinction, in a patch of forest on an island in the South China Sea, and nowhere else.
• Hainan is China's only tropical island province — sometimes called China's Hawaii. It has been a free trade port since 2020, with ambitions to become a global financial and tourism hub by 2025. The rainforest in the center of the island and the resort cities on its coast exist in deliberate tension.
• Wuzhi Mountain — “Five Finger Mountain” — is the highest peak on Hainan at 1,867 meters. It is sacred to the Li people, Hainan's indigenous inhabitants, who have lived on the island for over 3,000 years and whose textile traditions were inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2009.
• China's National Park system was formally established in 2021 with five inaugural parks. Hainan Tropical Rainforest was one of them — a deliberate signal that China was serious about conservation, at least in some places, at the same time it was building coal plants elsewhere.
• The Hainan peacock-pheasant also on this coin is found nowhere else on earth. It is critically endangered. Two endemic species on one coin, both clinging on.

The Rarest Primate on Earth Lives Here

There are fewer Hainan gibbons alive today than there are people reading this product description. Probably. The last census put the population at around 37 individuals — six family groups, all in one valley, in one park, on one island. They are the most endangered primate in the world, and they have been for decades. They sing at dawn — a haunting, whooping call that carries through the forest canopy — and there are almost none left to hear.

The gibbon is on this coin because China wants you to know the park exists. Whether that awareness translates into the habitat protection the species needs is a different question. But the coin is beautiful, and the animal on it is extraordinary, and owning this is a small way of marking that something this rare still exists.

Five Fingers, One Mountain, Three Thousand Years

Wuzhi Mountain — Five Finger Mountain — rises from the center of Hainan like a fist. The Li people have lived in its shadow for millennia, developing a culture, a language, and a textile tradition — li brocade — that UNESCO recognized as intangible world heritage. The mountain is the spiritual and geographic heart of the island. The rainforest that surrounds it is what the national park was built to protect.

Hainan is also, simultaneously, a free trade zone, a beach resort destination, and an increasingly important node in China's economic ambitions. The forest and the development are in constant negotiation. The coin captures the forest. The rest is complicated.

Own This Coin From the Forest at the Edge of Survival

This is a current-issue Chinese commemorative — legal tender, struck at the Shanghai and Shenyang Mints in 2025, part of the China National Park series. Mintage is 50 million — smaller than most Chinese commemoratives, which makes it modestly more collectible within the series.

On one side: the national emblem of the world's most populous country. On the other: a forest, a mountain, a river, and two species that exist nowhere else. One of them has fewer than 40 individuals left.

The coin costs less than a coffee. The gibbon is priceless, and nearly gone.