Today, the Palace of the Qin King, an austere complex with curved roofs, red pillars, and a grand entrance of ninety-nine steps, rises amid the green mountains of southern China. Two thousand years ago, it was nestled in the scrubby hills of the north, where its occupant became the country’s first emperor. That structure now lies in ruins, but a replica of the original can be found at Hengdian World Studios, the largest movie lot ever built. On a drizzly morning in March, the palace’s front gate was besieged by a throng of tourists, while a watchtower was filled with actors filming a historical drama.

Nearby, extras assembled outside the gates of an imitation Forbidden City, hoping to join a cinematic mob. The set has been featured in dozens of productions filmed at Hengdian. Although it is a bit smaller than the original compound, in Beijing—some of the minor buildings have been edited out—it looks better, gleaming as it did at the peak of imperial rule. In the capital, the Forbidden City is run by one of China’s most obtuse agencies, the Ministry of Culture, and the buildings there look worn and battered. In March, all that was missing from the Hengdian model was Chairman Mao’s picture, on the Gate of Heavenly Peace—but that was only because the set had recently been used to shoot a movie that takes place before 1949.

Some of China’s most iconic buildings have been erected on Hengdian’s sprawling lot, giving the place the ersatz-historical feel of Colonial Williamsburg. The sets look authentic on camera, even if illusion is sometimes involved: when I visited, carpenters assembling a banquet hall were painting cheap pine so that it resembled fine Burmese rosewood. Across the lot, construction teams and artisans were re-creating Shanghai’s Bund, the series of European-style buildings along the Huangpu River which defined the city’s era of colonial control and decadent living.

A few movies filmed at Hengdian, such as Zhang Yimou’s 2002 martial-arts epic, “Hero,” have achieved international success, but most are tailored to the Chinese market. Hengdian specializes in costume pageants and patriotic war films. (Last year, sixty per cent of the films and TV shows shot there were set during the Second World War, which is known in China as the Anti-Japanese War.) The scripts call for romance, violence, and ambition, and the acting is melodramatic: to signal anger, performers arch their brows and widen their eyes like the door god of a Chinese temple. Makeup often recalls Peking opera: heavy and bright, as if the faces were meant to be seen onstage rather than in closeup.

Photograph by Matthew Niederhauser / INSTITUTE

In March, productions being filmed included “The Wolfish Smoke of War,” “The City of Desperate Love,” and “The Priceless Key to the Palace.” I joined a crew surveying locations for “The Scout’s Sword”—a thirty-part television epic celebrating the courage of Communist commandos in China’s civil war. We got into a gray van and sped past a made-to-order Zen temple. In the back was Ah Jiao, a thirty-eight-year-old studio manager who helps hold the anarchic lot together, setting schedules and settling disputes among the crews jockeying for shooting time on some stretch of Hengdian’s eight thousand acres. The lot is twenty-seven times larger than Universal and Paramount studios combined, but it’s still not enough: on average, there are twenty movies or television dramas being filmed at Hengdian simultaneously, and many more directors are waiting to begin shooting. Filmmakers are eager to tap into China’s box office, which last year totalled $2.7 billion, surpassing Japan to become the world’s second largest. Others come to supply China’s gargantuan television industry: the country has more than twenty-five hundred stations.

Ah Jiao’s phone rang, and she tried to pacify two factions vying to occupy a tenth-century palace. “Can you delay your shooting a day?” she asked one producer. “It would be better if you could wait and start later.” Calling another number, she said, “You can’t keep it that long. Can’t you speed it up?”

She put down her phone, turned to the men in the van, and relaxed: they were old friends who had worked with Ah Jiao many times. Led by Jia Zuoliang, an art professor and set designer, the crew was looking for a field where they could stage a battle from the nineteen-forties. That was an easy task: Ah Jiao’s specialty is staging wars. Hengdian keeps large expanses of farmland fallow, ready to host any army. Short on soldiers? The lot has nearly twelve thousand registered actors and extras, and Buddhist priests are available to bless the cast and crew. A studio slogan is: “Arrive with your script, leave with your reels.”

Hengdian takes its name from the town that it dominates, controlling its land and its economy. When the lot needs to be expanded, the company blows up mountains, flattens villages, tears down temples, and bulldozes cemeteries. It’s currently re-creating an eight-hundred-acre Qing-dynasty pleasure palace. Hengdian doesn’t just want to make films; it wants to use its sets to tell the Chinese people their history. Last year, nearly twelve million tourists came to see the country’s architectural marvels, all in one place.

When I visited the lot, the studio was gearing up for dozens of spring productions. Ah Jiao was working twelve hours a day, six days a week, coördinating the crews. She was immaculately turned out—fluorescent-blue down jacket, red boots, black tights, shoulder-length permed hair—but her thin fingers repeatedly drummed her phone, and exhaustion rimmed her eyes.

The shoot for “The Scout’s Sword” was scheduled to start in two weeks, but pulling things off at the last minute is the Hengdian way. We parked on the crest of a hill, and walked past a bus filled with Red Army soldiers. A casting director for a television docudrama, “Mao Zedong,” stood on a row of sandbags, supervising two men who were dabbing black paint on clumps of red earth. “It’s raining,” the casting director said, pointing to the troops in the bus. “The soldiers can’t come out.”

We pressed on, descending the other side of the slope, beneath glistening pine trees. In the distance was a small lake, and across it were the white smudges of a village. A wooden farmhouse appeared in the mist. These days, most of China’s villages are made of concrete, which means that a studio farmhouse need only be wooden to look generically old. The farmhouse had been built for an adventure film set in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), but Jia said, “We can use it. Things didn’t change too much in the countryside.” He snapped photographs and drew sketches for ten minutes, until the rain picked up.

As we hurried back to the van, Ah Jiao said, “When do you want to shoot? The eighteenth, right? So what if I give it to you on the fourteenth?”

“Only four days to prepare?” Jia said. “Can’t we have it earlier?”

“It’s cheaper if you work faster.”

He laughed, knowing that he couldn’t win. “O.K.

The trademark of the town of Hengdian is a golden water buffalo. At major intersections, replicas stand in traffic circles, gazing at passing cars. Legend has it that the beast lives on Eight-Faced Mountain, an extinct volcano on the outskirts of town, and one day will descend and lead people to prosperity. Locals like to joke that the buffalo has already arrived, in the form of Xu Wenrong, the retired head of the conglomerate that owns the film lot: the Hengdian Group.

Xu, who is seventy-eight, started the company in 1975, when Mao was still alive and private enterprise was illegal. In many parts of China, Xu’s kind of market instincts resulted in the death penalty, but Hengdian was in Zhejiang Province, a freewheeling area of the country, and the company began churning out components for electronics, such as semiconductors and circuit boards. The Hengdian Group is now worth $6.7 billion.

Venturing into films was an equally pragmatic decision. In the nineties, Xu took note of China’s booming domestic-tourism industry and devised ways to lure visitors to the area. He started with rural resorts featuring song-and-dance shows, but they fell flat. In 1995, however, he met another native of Zhejiang Province, the film director Xie Jin, who was preparing to shoot “The Opium War,” a movie about China’s humiliating loss to the British, in 1842. The film was a big propaganda effort, and Xie had top-level backing from the government, but he couldn’t find an outdoor lot for nineteenth-century street scenes. There was no time to waste: the film had to be released on July 1, 1997, when China would regain control of Hong Kong, which it had lost in the war.

According to Xu’s autobiography, published in 2011, he promised Xie over dinner that he could build the set. Asked which films he liked, Xu had to admit that he never watched movies. Xie declined the offer and went home to Shanghai. That week, Xu sent an assistant to Shanghai to follow up. Desperate, Xie accepted, and in January, 1996, Xu started construction.

Xu mobilized the small town, assigning tasks to a hundred and twenty teams. He made sure that everything was built by hand, as if a real town were being constructed. When Xie said that he wanted old, worn stones for the streets, Xu dispatched teams to the countryside to buy stone floors from the homes of peasants. He even took some tombstones from unmarked graves. Xu completed the set in August, and the film was released on time.

Soon, other filmmakers came to Hengdian to use the “Opium War” lots, and they told Xu what other sets they needed. Xu began building full-scale, fairly accurate replicas of famous old temples and palaces. He also created a facsimile of the Communists’ remote wartime base in Yan’an, with caves dug into the mountains and a replica of the town’s famous pagoda.

Hengdian’s strongest lure is its price: Xu builds, renovates, and offers his lots free of charge. Chinese stars rarely earn the big money of their overseas counterparts, so production costs are a key factor in movie and television budgets. Shooting at Hengdian is such a relative bargain that it outweighs the site’s main drawback: remoteness. There are no air or rail connections to Hengdian, which has around a hundred and fifty thousand residents, and the closest large city is two and a half hours away by car.

Profits come from the studio’s subsidiaries, which provide costumes, props, design, catering, and other services. Revenues at the studio are also driven by tourism. Visitors pay fifty-five dollars for a two-day pass, and the Hengdian Group controls most of the area’s twelve thousand hotel beds.

The baroque sets and costumed hordes recall Cecil B. De Mille’s glory days in Hollywood, from the nineteen-tens to the fifties. But those spectacles were some of the most expensive and profitable films of their era, helping to disseminate American culture worldwide. Hengdian films have low budgets, and the town has no villas, fancy night clubs, or high-end restaurants. There’s no equivalent of Rodeo Drive, and no cinema that’s elegant enough for a blockbuster première.

As the Chinese-American producer David Lee told me, the town’s sleepiness can be an advantage. Some of Lee’s movies have been partly shot in Hengdian, including “The Forbidden Kingdom,” a 2008 action film starring Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Though top-flight talent can find Hengdian maddeningly dull, Lee said, “From a producer’s or director’s point of view it’s great: we’ve got you guys in one place, and we’ll shoot and shoot.”

For all its constraints, Hengdian can feel more like a movie town than Hollywood does. The big lot has long been passé in Hollywood; instead, films tend to be made on location or in front of green screens, with backgrounds later generated by computers. As a result, Hollywood itself has a hollowed-out feeling. At Hengdian, you immediately sense that movies are being shot all around you. Air horns blare to silence chattering extras, trucks off-load freshly made props, and directors yell at their assistants. Low-slung Porsches dodge potholes, and crews mill around on break. Once, I saw an actor, dressed as a Red Army soldier, rhythmically moving his head. Snaking out of his ammunition belt was a white wire, working up his torso to his head: earbuds.

boulevard lined with two-story buildings and groups of young people chatting and playing pool.

“Hengdian drifters,” she said. “They come here looking for acting work. Some make it, but a lot just stay for a year or two and go home.”

I wanted to meet some of them, so she drove down the road and dropped me off at a friend’s place—a photography studio run by one of the stalwarts of the acting community, Zhang Xiaoming. A trim forty-four-year-old with a receding hairline, Zhang was helping an actor with his résumé, which included images of the man as a Taoist priest, an emperor’s minister, and a nineteen-thirties businessman.

An actress named Jennifer Tu stopped by. “I play spies, police officers, and court ladies,” she said, handing Zhang a memory stick containing photographs of her in costume. A round-faced twenty-six-year-old, she used to earn fifteen hundred dollars a month as an English translator in Shenzhen, and now makes a third of that. But she has seen herself on television. “It was about the Anti-Japanese War,” she said. “I was a journalist. I thought it was O.K. We know the history.”

The door opened and Tian Xiping entered, greeting Zhang in a booming voice. Tian, who is forty-nine, used to sing for a living, but he told me that he had gained too much weight. “It looks bad if you’re a fat singer,” he said. “So I went into acting.” He now made a hundred and twenty dollars a day as a professional fat man, and worked about a hundred and fifty days a year. “The way I look, I can be a fat cook or a commander-in-chief,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of generals.” In his next role, he would be a pig butcher.

“But there’s a cost,” Zhang said. Actors feel that they must live in Hengdian in order to find work, but this separates them from their families. Last year, Tian’s father was seriously ill, and Tian couldn’t get home before he died.

“We’re like migrant laborers,” Tian said, nodding.

While we were talking, a dark-eyed man walked in. He had a shaved head and a thin mustache, and he stared at me in an unsettling manner. I cocked an eyebrow at Zhang.

“This is Gu Dechao,” Zhang said. Gu had recently performed as Chiang Kai-shek in a thirty-episode television series, and still looked the part. “Remember? Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Chiang—the Big Four. If not for him, it wouldn’t be the world we know today! The baldy.”

“The way I look, I always play villains,” Gu said.

“He can’t play good guys!”

“Bosses in triads, local ruffians, hoodlums, despotic landlords.”

“But now he’s eaten too much and is fat. He used to be thin.”

“A guy like me should look like an opium addict. You see me and you want to vomit.”

Gu was currently working as a casting director for a new television series, and he invited me to observe the shoot. The rain had driven the production into a makeshift studio across town. Hengdian is an improvised patchwork of new roads that have no signs, and we soon got lost. We drove past Ah Jiao’s offices, down the row of carpenter’s shops that make props, and along a road that dead-ended at a brick wall. There was a car-size hole in the wall and, after making a phone call, Gu drove through it. We lurched over a dirt field that looked like a vegetable garden strewn with rocks. Then we hit a road lined with derelict buildings and, after a few more phone calls and wrong turns, ended up in an alley of old factory sheds.

Sitting out front, on a wooden throne, was Danny Lam, a Hong Kong set manager. He wearily waved us inside. At the entrance, there was no red light demanding silence; like most television shows in Hengdian, it would be dubbed later, so only minimal effort was made to keep things quiet during shooting. The factory had been transformed into the interior of a Chinese palace: red and black walls, with touches of gold leaf. The décor reminded me of Shanghai Tang, the luxury clothing store.

Lam has worked in Hengdian for eight years. “It’s run by a businessman, so it’s efficient,” he said. “Whatever you need is here. Song dynasty, Ming, Qing—whatever. It’s all quickly available.”

The series, “Four Young Famous Vigilantes,” is set in the nineteenth century. It’s about a comic band of heroes—a fencer, a boxer, a genius, and an alcoholic loafer—who are charged with safeguarding the imperial capital. The heroes have colorful names: the boxer is Iron Fist, the fencer is Cold Blood. The byzantine plot features a lot of skulduggery and double-crosses. The episode being shot involved Iron Fist trying to rescue his girlfriend, who had been kidnapped by the series’ main villain. When the weather cleared, the team planned to film a kung-fu sequence at the Forbidden City lot.

The series was packed with action, but it also “emphasized a lot of history,” Gu said. “I don’t really know why, but that seems popular.”

Story continues in original article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/22/studio-city