Jiangmen as Jinghai: walking the arcade quarter that The Knockout borrowed

At the hour when the Jiangmen River turns the colour of weak tea, someone on the embankment is usually standing under an arcade, phone raised, photographing a signboard left over from a television shoot. Next door a hardware shop sells rope, hinges and plastic basins, and nobody behind the counter looks up. The street has been two places at once for a while now, and has settled into it.

A city cast as somewhere else

Jinghai (京海) does not exist. It is the invented coastal city of The Knockout (狂飙, Kuangbiao), a crime serial that follows a fishmonger's rise across two decades, and most of its streets belong to Jiangmen (江门), on the western side of the Pearl River Delta. The production wanted a place that could pass for the year 2000 without much carpentry. Pengjiang District (蓬江区), the old commercial core, could.

Jiangmen is the seat of the Wuyi (五邑) region, the five counties that sent generations of emigrants abroad and received their remittances back as brick and concrete. That money built the qilou (骑楼), arcaded shophouses whose upper floors project over the pavement on columns. Many of them here were never turned into a showpiece. They were left in use, which is what a camera looks for.

京海是虚构的，骑楼是真的。

Changdi and the thirty-three market lanes

The waterfront strip is signed Changdi Fengmao Jie (长堤风貌街), the 'long embankment'. Arcades run along one side and the river along the other, and plaster pediments carry the names of trading firms in relief, some legible, some worn to a suggestion. Walk inland and the ground rises toward Xuding (墟顶), the 'top of the market', the knoll where the town's periodic market first gathered. The lanes that web the slope are now presented together as Sanshisan Xu Jie (三十三墟街), the thirty-three market streets.

The drama's Old Factory Street (旧厂街, Jiuchang Jie), the neighbourhood its characters come from, was stitched together from several of these lanes; it was not filmed on one. Visitors still arrive holding screenshots up against doorways. Some of the production's shopfront lettering was kept or remade as a photo point, though what is in place changes as tenants do. The district's own map panels mark the better-known corners.

Telling the set from the street

The dressed parts give themselves away by being too coherent: one typeface, one decade, paint aged evenly. The real fabric is messier. Column faces carry hand-painted business names in red, air-conditioner brackets rust at different rates, and a wooden ladder leans in a stairwell that leads up to somebody's flat. Shops along the embankment deal in fishing tackle, rope and dried seafood, and they trade to their regulars, not to the cameras.

Food has the same double layer. Zhujiao mian (猪脚面), the pig's trotter noodles a character orders on screen, appeared on signboards around the quarter once the series aired, and it is a reasonable bowl. The local inheritance is something else. Waihai mian (外海面) are thin egg noodles named for a riverside township in the city, usually tossed dry with lard and soy. Roast goose comes in the style of Gujing (古井), a town in Xinhui District (新会区). Xinhui chenpi (新会陈皮), aged tangerine peel, is sold from glass jars labelled by year and ends up steeped in tea or simmered into red bean soup.

Qimingli, uphill and quieter

A short ride from the embankment, Qimingli (启明里) is a compact cluster of brick houses put up by families returning from overseas. The lanes are narrow enough that two people with umbrellas have to negotiate. The production filmed here too, and the neighbourhood has since taken on cafés, small guesthouses and craft shops in some houses while others remain homes, with laundry on bamboo poles and a bicycle parked across the step.

Front doors often open straight onto a living room, so photograph the facades and leave the interiors alone. Older residents talk in the Siyi (四邑) speech of the region, which Cantonese speakers from Guangzhou often struggle to follow. Mandarin works for ordering and directions in most shops, and a translation app covers the rest.

The older film layer in Kaiping

Jiangmen was a location long before the series. Roughly an hour west by road, in the county-level city of Kaiping (开平), the river town of Chikan (赤坎) lines the Tan River (潭江) with arcades, and its streets stood in for Republican-era southern towns in several features, The Grandmaster among them. Chikan today is a different proposition from the town those crews found. It was emptied, rebuilt and reopened as a managed heritage district, with restored facades, new paving and evening lighting. The street plan is the same and the surface is reconstructed, and it is better to look at it as that.

Outside town, the diaolou (碉楼), fortified tower-houses built with emigrant money, stand in rice fields around Zili Village (自力村), where parts of Let the Bullets Fly (让子弹飞) were filmed. The towers are concrete, several storeys high, with iron shutters and rooftop pavilions that borrow freely from whatever their owners had seen abroad. From the paddy paths they look less like a set than anything in the city does.

Getting there and getting it right

Most visitors come by rail from Guangzhou South (广州南站) to Jiangmen Station (江门站), which stands in Xinhui District, a fair taxi or bus ride from the old quarter. Some services use Jiangmen East (江门东站), which is nearer; check which station your train uses on 12306, the national rail booking platform, when you buy. For Kaiping, intercity coaches leave from Jiangmen's bus terminals and trains run to Kaiping South (开平南站). Chikan and Zili Village are a further local bus or car ride apart, so the old quarter and the towers sit more comfortably on separate days.

The cooler, drier months from late autumn to early spring are easiest for walking. Summer is hot and wet, though the arcades were built for exactly that, and an afternoon downpour under them is the architecture doing its job. Go to Changdi in the last two hours of daylight, when the columns throw long shadows and the food stalls set up. Chikan and the diaolou villages are managed sites with their own admission arrangements, and these change; confirm current terms and hours with the Kaiping Diaolou scenic area's official channels or the Jiangmen culture and tourism bureau before travelling.

The mistake to avoid is asking a driver for Old Factory Street. It is a name from a script, not an address, and drivers interpret it differently. Give the destination as Changdi Fengmao Jie or Sanshisan Xu Jie, show the characters on your phone, and let the screenshots find their doorways on foot.