Hengdian's palaces are thirty years old: how a period drama gets built

The palace courtyard you walk through in Hengdian (横店, Héngdiàn) reads as five centuries old and was poured in the 1990s. The gap between what the lens sees and what the ground knows is the reason to go.

A town built backwards

Hengdian is a township in Dongyang (东阳), a woodcarving county in Zhejiang, about an hour by road from Yiwu's high-speed station. The first lot went up in 1996 for a film about the Opium War and was never struck afterwards. Every lot since arrived the same way: a production needs a Qin palace, a Song market town, a Forbidden City, and when the crew leaves the set stays and starts selling tickets.

What stays and what gets redressed

The big structures are fixed: the terraced stairs of the Qin palace, the near-full-scale Ming and Qing courtyards, the Song market modelled on a scroll painting. Everything within arm's reach is not — signage, lantern colour, the dressing of a doorway come down and go back up between productions, sometimes inside a week. Photograph a gate in March, return in June, and the characters above it will belong to another dynasty.

The early shift

Crews start before visitors do. Casting for background actors runs through a guild office in town, calls go out at dawn, and the people who take them are known as hengpiao (横漂), Hengdian drifters. Come at opening and you get the working version: catering vans, a costume trolley crossing a Qing alley, an assistant holding a crowd off a lens.

Nothing here is old. The craft is making thirty years read as five hundred, one dressed doorway at a time.

Where the old thing actually is

Forty minutes north, in Dongyang's old quarter, Lu Zhai (卢宅, Lú Zhái) does what the sets imitate. It is a residential complex begun in the Ming and added to by one family for generations, its ceremonial hall carrying the carving the county is named for. On a weekday it is quiet, and the wood smells like wood.

横店的宫殿不到三十年，四十分钟外的卢宅是真的旧。