Where a viral Tang drama's Chang'an still stands: Ningbo's Xiangshan film city

The drama compressed one day in the Tang capital into forty-odd hours of television, and to build that day it needed a city. Two hours south of Shanghai, in the hills of Xiangshan County outside Ningbo, most of that city is still standing — and unlike a soundstage, you can walk down its main avenue.

What the set actually is

Xiangshan Film City (象山影视城, Xiàngshān Yǐngshìchéng) sits in Xinqiao (新桥镇), a town of tangerine groves and reservoirs about an hour beyond Ningbo proper. Its Tang City (唐城, Tángchéng) quarter was raised across 2016 and 2017 for The Longest Day in Chang'an (长安十二时辰, Cháng'ān Shí'èr Shíchén), the series that aired in the summer of 2019 and turned this stretch of Zhejiang backcountry into a pilgrimage for people who had watched Lei Jiayin's Zhang Xiaojing chase a plot across a burning capital. The avenue is laid out on the grid the show leaned on: a broad central road wide enough for a cavalry column, ward walls to either side, a gate tower closing the far end. Walk it before nine and the proportions read exactly as they did on screen, the light still low enough that the timber looks aged rather than new.

Facade and floor

Most of the ward fronts are just that — timber-and-plaster faces with nothing behind the doorways, propped from the rear by scaffolding you are not meant to see. The gate tower and a handful of courtyard buildings are built through, so you can climb and look back down the axis the camera used, the one long shot the series returned to whenever it needed to remind you how large Chang'an was supposed to feel. Knowing which is which changes how you move. You stop trying doors and start reading the street as a stage flat, which is what it is, and the whole place becomes more interesting for being honest about it. The paving is deliberately uneven, laid to throw shadow under a raking sun; on an overcast day it flattens out and the illusion slips, which is one more reason to come with the morning light.

从上海南下约两小时到宁波，象山影视城的唐城至今仍在。

The street at ground level

By mid-morning the avenue fills with rented costume. The gate near the entrance hires out Tang-style robes and headpieces from roughly 80 yuan for a couple of hours, more if you want a photographer to follow you, and for long stretches the crowd is a slow procession of pale silk and paper fans moving toward the tower. Costumed staff run scheduled set pieces through the day — a mock night-watch changing of the guard, a lantern sequence keyed to the drama's Shangyuan festival — posted on a board at the gate rather than announced, so it is worth photographing the schedule on the way in. The snack lanes lean into the Chang'an theme without pretending to be authentic: stalls sell roujiamo (肉夹馍), the shredded-pork flatbread of the real Xi'an, alongside skewers and sweet osmanthus drinks, most items in the 10-to-25-yuan range and paid for, without exception, by phone. Xiangshan is a fishing county, so if you leave the set hungry the town proper does far better seafood than anything inside the walls.

Beyond the Tang quarter

Tang City is the reason most people now come, but it was grafted onto an older complex. The original Xiangshan grounds were built around the Spring and Autumn and Warring States City (春秋战国城, Chūnqiū Zhànguó Chéng), raised in the mid-2000s for a Confucius production, and a separate Shendiao (神雕) section themed to the Jin Yong wuxia adaptations shot here. A combined ticket lets you cross between them on foot, and the contrast is the point: the older wards are heavier, grey-walled, built for sword epics, while Tang City is airier and more theatrical. A single day is enough to cover the Tang quarter properly and glance at the rest; two if you want to sit through every performance without rushing the axis.

Going, and when

There is no rail line into Xiangshan, which keeps the day trip honest. From Ningbo, coaches leave the South Bus Station (宁波汽车南站) for Xiangshan county town every half-hour or so and take around two hours; from there it is a short taxi or local bus out to Xinqiao and the gate. Driving from Ningbo is faster, closer to ninety minutes, and the site has a large car park. Tickets are sold at the main gate, with the combined pass generally in the region of 150 yuan and cheaper single-section options if you only want the Tang street. Gates open around 8:30 and close by 17:00, and the one mistake to avoid is arriving without a working cash-free wallet — Alipay or WeChat Pay tied to a foreign card if you can, because the ticket window, the costume desk and every stall inside expect a scan, and a paper note will simply stall the queue behind you. Come on a weekday, walk the avenue first while it is empty, and let the crowds fill it behind you.