Hengdian World Studios

Listen for a moment. Somewhere nearby, a man in a silk robe is shouting a line he has shouted twenty times today. A generator hums behind a painted palace wall. The paving stones under your feet look ancient. Tap one with your shoe, though, and some of them sound a little hollow. Welcome to Hengdian World Studios, a place where centuries of Chinese history stand side by side, all of it built for the camera.

You are in Hengdian, a town in the hills of Zhejiang Province. It belongs to Dongyang, a county-level city under Jinhua. A few decades ago this was farmland and small workshops. Today it holds one of the largest film and television production bases on Earth. Chinese media often call it Chinawood. Walk its streets on a busy day and you may pass three or four film crews before lunch.

The story begins with a local businessman named Xu Wenrong. In the 1990s he built industry in Hengdian, and then he made an unusual bet. The director Xie Jin needed a nineteenth-century Guangzhou street for his film The Opium War. Xu offered to build it here. The set went up in 1996, and the film came out the following year. That single street became the seed of everything you see around you now.

Other directors soon followed. Chen Kaige came to make The Emperor and the Assassin, a film about the first emperor of China. For it, the studio built a vast palace complex in the style of the Qin dynasty. The Qin was the dynasty that first unified China, more than two thousand years ago. That palace still stands, with its dark timber, long stairways and wide stone courtyards. Many later historical dramas have used it too.

Here is the first surprise. Many of these sets are not facades at all. In older Hollywood backlots, a building is often just a front wall held up by wooden props. Here, many halls are full structures you can walk inside. Roofs carry real tiles. Courtyards have real depth. This lets crews shoot from almost any angle, and it is one reason the same street can appear in hundreds of different productions.

One of the largest areas recreates the imperial palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Those were the last two dynasties to rule China, and their real palace is the Forbidden City in Beijing. The Hengdian version is built at full scale. The red walls, the yellow roof tiles and the white stone terraces follow the same imperial style. Filming inside the real Forbidden City is very difficult, so countless palace dramas have used this copy instead.

As you move between the zones, notice how quickly the centuries change. You can leave an ancient palace and, a short walk later, arrive on a street of colonial-era shopfronts. There are old Hong Kong and Guangzhou street scenes with shop signs, balconies and tram tracks. Elsewhere, scenes are inspired by Along the River During the Qingming Festival, a famous painted scroll from the Song dynasty. It shows daily life in a riverside city about nine hundred years ago.

The second surprise is about the people. Hengdian runs on extras. Thousands of hopeful actors live in the town, waiting for work as soldiers, servants, courtiers and crowds. In Chinese they are often called Hengpiao, which roughly means the drifters of Hengdian. Some come for a season. Others stay for years. Many say they hope to be noticed and given a speaking role one day. A few have succeeded.

So look closely at the crowd around you. The young man eating noodles in armour may have spent his whole morning dying on a battlefield. The woman in court dress, checking her phone between takes, may play a palace maid in one drama this week and a villager in another next week. Here, the line between visitors and performers is thin. You are walking through a working town as much as a tourist site.

For visitors, Hengdian is also a theme park. Each major zone usually has its own staged performances, from battle scenes to court ceremonies and stunt shows. Some use fire, horses or water effects. Schedules change, so it is worth checking the programme at each gate when you arrive. The site is spread across several separate areas. Many visitors find that one day covers only a part of it, so choose your eras before you set out.

If you see a film crew working, slow down and watch quietly. Crew members may ask you to wait while they finish a take. This is part of the experience, not an interruption. You can see how a scene is built. A director checks a monitor. An assistant smooths a costume. Someone holds a reflector to catch the light. Then everything stops, and the same few seconds happen again, and again.

The materials here are worth a closer look too. Some walls are true brick and stone. Others are plaster, foam or fibreglass, painted to look old. Set painters add stains, cracks and moss so the camera reads age. Up close, you can sometimes see where a weathered column meets fresh paint, or where a stone step has a modern seam. These small details show how film builders trick the eye. They also show how much skill goes into every surface.

Hengdian also changed the town itself. Hotels, restaurants and costume shops have grown up around the studios. Local families rent rooms to actors and crew. The economy of the town now moves with the rhythm of film schedules. When a large production arrives, the streets fill with people in costume. When filming slows, the town becomes quieter. In this way, the studios are not just a place to visit. They are the main reason the modern town exists.

Before you leave, stand still for a minute in whichever street you are in now. Look at the roofline against the sky. Listen for the mix of sounds around you: footsteps, a director's call, a vendor, perhaps a drum from a nearby show. All of this was built to be seen through a lens. Yet right now, you are seeing it with your own eyes. As you walk on, notice which details would fool a camera, and which ones only you can see.