Filming Locations

Four feature films and one television series have used this place as another world. Zhang Yimou shot two of them here. The image it sells — banded hills in rust and ochre and grey, folded like a blanket dropped on a bed — has been on more screens than almost any other Chinese landscape. And

There is a village in Fujian that took a film’s name. For roughly six hundred and fifty years it was called 长教. In 2006 a film called 云水谣 was shot there, the film became the biggest Chinese romance of its year, and the village now answers to the title. The bus stop says it. The

The drama is called The Wrath of Time: Xiangxi. Xiangxi is in Hunan. Almost none of the landscape in it was filmed there. The Enshi filming locations below are where the cameras went instead. That is not a scandal, and it is not a trick played on the audience. It is something more interesting: a

Most Chinese cities end up on screen because of what they look like. Jingdezhen was chosen twice, fifty years apart, for two completely different reasons — and both times the crew went to the same valley east of the city. The Jingdezhen filming locations below are those two trips, fifty years apart. In 1974 the

Wulanbutong is the reason a Qing dynasty can be shot in Inner Mongolia without building a palace, a steppe battle can be staged without CGI, and a director who needs “the grasslands” can stop looking at a map. These Wulanbutong filming locations sit in Hexigten Banner, Chifeng, in the south-east corner of the autonomous region

Dalian does not usually play itself. That is the first thing to understand about the Dalian filming locations. When a Chinese production needs a European street, a 1930s port, a Japanese colonial town or simply a coastline that looks like somewhere else, it flies to the southern tip of Liaoning and points a camera at

In 1985 a Chinese television crew carried cameras up a river gorge in northern Fujian and filmed a monkey god being rescued from under a mountain. The episode was the fifth of what became the most-watched television series in the world, and the gorge was Wuyishan. Forty years later the same sandstone peaks, the same

China has been filming Wuyuan for more than fifty years. In 1974 it was The Sparkling Red Star, with a boy on a bamboo raft drifting down the Xing River. In 1987 it was the Liaozhai television series, shooting in a riverside village at Sikou. In 2003 it was Warm, the film that won Tokyo’s

Almost every famous Chinese film you can quote was shot in the same dusty corner of the north-west. Red Sorghum, A Chinese Odyssey, Ashes of Time — all of them were filmed at Zhenbeibao, a studio built inside two ruined Ming frontier forts on the edge of the Gobi, 35 km from Yinchuan. This is

Datong is the city Chinese period drama keeps pretending to be. Its old name, Pingcheng, was the capital of the Northern Wei, and a dozen series set in that world — The Princess Weiyoung among them — were shot somewhere else entirely. Yet Datong is also a place where the cameras genuinely went: the director