Hengdian World Studios
— — the largest film backlot in the world.
Not only on a wall.
“Hengdian is a small town in Zhejiang that became China's film capital almost by accident. A businessman built a Qin palace there in 1996 for one historical epic, then kept building. The backlot now covers more than 300 hectares and holds full-scale replicas of the Forbidden City, a Song-era street, a Ming-Qing market town, and a Hong Kong block from the 1930s. Twenty thousand actors live in town. On most days, several productions are shooting at once.
Hengdian World Studios, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hengdian World Studios sits in Hengdian town within the city of Dongyang, Zhejiang Province, about 300 kilometres southwest of Shanghai. The complex was founded in 1996 by the businessman Xu Wenrong, originally to build a Qin dynasty palace for Xie Jin's film The Opium War. It has grown into the largest film studio in the world by area, with reported figures around 330 hectares and more than 30 themed shooting bases. The studios are run by the Hengdian Group, which began as a township enterprise in the 1970s.
The major sets are built to scale and to last. The Ming-Qing Palace base reproduces much of Beijing's Forbidden City in concrete and timber across about 100,000 square metres. The Qingming Riverside reproduces the eleventh-century Bianjing street scene from Zhang Zeduan's scroll. The Hong Kong street recreates the 1930s waterfront for republican-era dramas. The Tang and Song palaces, the Qin-Han imperial palace, and a Zen temple complex all stand permanently. None of these are scaled-down park attractions — they are working sets that double as a theme park between productions.
Hengdian draws roughly 15 million visitors a year, second only to a handful of national parks in China. Tickets are sold individually for each base or as multi-day combination passes; the major palaces and the Qingming Riverside are the most visited. Guests can sometimes watch filming from the edges. The nearest airport is Yiwu, about 50 kilometres away; the Hengdian high-speed rail station opened in 2023, putting the town under three hours from Shanghai Hongqiao. Most accommodation clusters around the studios and the central park.