Changsha's Malanshan: the working district behind Chinese variety television, and what visitors see

Changsha appears in most English travel writing as a food stop — stinky tofu, a queue outside a milk-tea counter. Its other output is television: north of the Liuyang River, in Kaifu District, a dense cluster of studios and post-production houses supplies much of the variety programming watched across the mainland.

A district named after a hill nobody climbs

Malanshan (马栏山, Mǎlánshān) is now shorthand for the video and creative industry park that grew around the Hunan Broadcasting compound. Signage brands it China V Valley (中国V谷), and the streets themselves are unglamorous: canteens, print shops, coffee counters that open early, and vans parked with their rear doors up while flight cases come out.

What survives when a show ends

Happy Camp (快乐大本营, Kuàilè Dàběnyíng) ran for more than two decades before it stopped airing in 2021, and nothing about the district visibly changed. Sets in this business are struck and rebuilt on a weekly cycle; what stays is infrastructure — soundstages, control rooms, lighting grids, edit suites — which is why a format can vanish and the address keeps working.

Here the sets are temporary and the buildings are not.

Seeing it without a recording ticket

Audience seats for the larger programmes are distributed through official channels rather than sold at a window, and recording dates are confirmed late. Without a seat, the honest version is exterior and adjacent: the Golden Eagle Film and Television Cultural City (金鹰影视文化城, Jīnyīng Yǐngshì Wénhuàchéng) beside the compound, and the Golden Eagle festival that puts the industry briefly onto the street.

综艺录制的观众席多由官方渠道发放，一般不公开售票。

The set you can walk into

Across town at Haixinsha, Super Wenheyou (超级文和友, Chāojí Wénhéyǒu) stacks reconstructed 1980s Changsha shopfronts — barber poles, hand-painted signs, tiled stairwells — inside a shopping podium and rents them to working restaurants. One district builds a street to be filmed; this one builds a street to be eaten in.