'The number's busy - can you hold?'

People in a tourist resort are complaining they have to hang on like acrobats to use a new phone booth - to avoid falling over the sea wall.

Callers say they have to hold onto a bar in the booth, in Sanya, southern China's Hainan Island, to make calls if they want to avoid tumbling over backwards.

And they complain that they even have to tiptoe along the edge of the wall to reach the public phone booth, owned by China Telecom, in the first place.

Residents suspect that the phone booth was designed this way for the convenience of advertisers wanting to promote their products on the road-facing side.

Tropical Hainan Island was once regarded as a backwater but is now being developed for tourism and is being promoted as China's Hawaii.