Hengdian World Studios

Where it sits. Hengdian is a town in the city of Dongyang, in central Zhejiang, about two hours inland from Hangzhou and a little over half an hour by road from the rail and wholesale hub of Yiwu. There is nothing scenic about the approach — low hills, factories, expressway — and then the sets begin, and the ordinary Chinese county town gives way to a full-scale Qin dynasty palace, a replica of the Forbidden City, a nineteenth-century Guangzhou waterfront and a neon Hong Kong street, all within a few kilometres of each other. Hengdian World Studios covers roughly 330 hectares of outdoor backlots with about 495,000 square metres of built floor area, spread across some thirty exterior bases and around 130 interior stages. It is among the largest film production complexes anywhere in the world.

How it happened. The complex exists because of one man and one film. Xu Wenrong, who had built the Hengdian Group out of a rural collective enterprise, agreed in 1996 to construct a nineteenth-century Guangzhou street for the director Xie Jin, who needed it for The Opium War, released for the 1997 handover of Hong Kong. Farmland became a backlot; the backlot was not torn down afterwards. The King of Qin Palace followed in 1997. The decisive commercial move came in 2000, when Hengdian abolished set rental fees altogether: crews shoot for free, and the group takes its return on hotels, catering, costume and equipment hire, extras and transport. Production volume exploded. In 2004 the surrounding area was designated China's first national film and television industry experimental zone, and in 2010 the studios were rated a national AAAAA scenic attraction — a film factory and a tourist attraction operating in the same buildings at the same time.

What has been shot here. More than a thousand feature films and television series have used these sets, and it is regularly reported that around seventy per cent of Chinese period television is made at Hengdian in any given year. The Qin and Han imperial palace complex was Zhang Yimou's backdrop for the emperor's throne hall in Hero (2002), the same set later used by the TVB serial A Step into the Past. Zhang returned for Curse of the Golden Flower. Chen Kaige shot parts of The Promise here. Ang Lee used Hengdian interiors on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. International productions have followed the same route, including The Forbidden Kingdom, the first film to pair Jackie Chan and Jet Li, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and Disney's live-action Mulan. The Ming and Qing Palace set, built at full scale against the plan of Beijing's Forbidden City, is the workhorse: it is where a crew goes when a scene needs an imperial courtyard that the real Forbidden City would never permit them to occupy.

The extras. Hengdian's other population is its floating army of aspiring performers, known in Chinese as hengpiao — people who have moved to the town to queue each morning for day work as soldiers, courtiers, corpses and crowd. Several thousand are registered at any time, and the culture around them, the boarding houses, the casting queues and the small hierarchies of who gets a line, is a recognised phenomenon in Chinese popular culture; it was the subject of the 2015 documentary I Am Somebody. For a visitor this is the most interesting thing about the place. Walk the sets on a weekday and you will pass several units filming simultaneously, with directors, dolly track and rows of costumed extras waiting in the shade.

What you actually see today. Each major set is ticketed separately, with combined passes available, and each functions as a themed park with staged shows: chariot stunts at the Qin Palace, a water and fire spectacle at the Yuanmingyuan replica of the Old Summer Palace, martial arts sequences on Guangzhou Street. The Guangzhou and Hong Kong street sets, with their period shop signs and neon, are the most atmospheric after dark. The Qingming Riverside set recreates the Song city depicted in the famous scroll painting. Expect the sets to be exactly what they are — three-sided façades with scaffolding behind, plaster over brick — which is part of the appeal for anyone curious about how the illusion is assembled.

Getting there and timing. The practical approach is high-speed rail to Yiwu, then around forty minutes by road, or to Jinhua and a similar drive; long-distance buses also run direct to Hengdian. Allow two full days for the main sets; one day covers three at most, given the distances and the shuttle buses between them. Spring and autumn are comfortable; Zhejiang summers are hot and humid and the sets offer little shade. Avoid the first weeks of May and October, when domestic holiday crowds are extreme. Filming can close individual sets at short notice, which is worth checking on arrival. Distances are long and surfaces uneven, though the main avenues are flat and paved.