The full moon hangs high in the illuminated valley as if it had just emerged from behind the thickets. Round, immense, yellowish, with its perfectly defined craters. Tourists stop and raise their phones. They all look for the same frame. It would be a spectacular postcard if it weren't for one detail: the Moon is not real. It is an artificial structure strategically placed on the slope of Wangxian Valley, one of the trendy tourist destinations in China. From below, it looks like a celestial body trapped between the mountains. Up close, it is just another piece of the set.
A gigantic prop Moon in an old abandoned granite mine transformed into a fantasy village. Perhaps there is no better metaphor to understand the relationship that China maintains with its past today.
When night falls, Wangxian Valley, nestled among the mountains of Jiangxi, an inland province in southeastern China located between Shanghai and Canton, seems like a place designed by an algorithm capable of combining all the elements destined to go viral on TikTok and Instagram. Traditional houses suspended on cliffs. Illuminated bridges. Stepped pagodas ascending the mountain like an oriental version of a baroque nativity scene. Commercial streets saturated with spicy food stalls, especially rice noodle soups. Young people dressed in silk tunics. Fireworks. Ritual dances. Ancestral percussion amplified by dozens of speakers. And thousands of visitors with their phones held high.
The first impression is dazzling. The second is unsettling. Because Wangxian Valley is not a restored ancient city. It is not even a historic town adapted for tourism. It is, to a large extent, a set built from scratch. A manufactured past where the visitor crosses a stone bridge under which an artificial stream flows. And on both sides, aged wooden buildings (also artificially).
In the central square, a show begins. A young woman dressed in red dances in a circle while actors with demonic masks surround her, beating huge drums decorated with yellow demons. The movements evoke ancient ceremonies from southern China, but the result is calibrated for contemporary tourist consumption: enough exoticism to seem ancient; enough rhythm to not bore a young audience accustomed to 20-second videos.
A few meters away, dozens of girls, mostly in their twenties, dressed in traditional hanfu dresses, pose under paper lanterns, among red curtains and scenarios reminiscent of ancient imperial weddings. At the bottom of the valley, in an area named Western District, musicians perform pop ballads in bars with terraces. Craft beers coexist with themed cocktails. And in the distance, the construction continues. More houses climbing other cliffs. The set keeps expanding...
For decades, China was the country that destroyed its past to build highways, skyscrapers, and urban developments. Today, it is also the country that rebuilds it. The phenomenon of fake ancient towns constitutes one of the most fascinating urban, economic, and cultural movements in the Asian giant. Driven by local governments desperate to generate economic growth, they promise immersive experiences of authenticity while offering exactly the opposite: idealized, sanitized, and profitable versions of China's past.
"China has a long history of rebuilding, repairing, replacing, and reconfiguring cities, monuments, temples, and landscapes. What some observers describe as fake may still be perceived by Chinese visitors as something significant, beautiful, or culturally evocative," explains Professor Yujie Zhu, one of China's leading experts in Heritage, Tourism, and Nationalism, author of several theses with an interesting focus: in the Asian country, authenticity does not necessarily depend on material antiquity but on the cultural and emotional significance that people attribute to places.
"These reconstructed cities are often designed to evoke certain ideas about history, tradition, and cultural identity, while serving economic and touristic functions," he points out.
"Many of these places are shaped by a logic similar to that of social networks and the consumption of short videos. They are designed to be visually striking, easily shareable, and emotionally stimulating. This can generate a form of fast consumption of heritage: beautiful, immersive, and enjoyable, but often superficial and ephemeral. The danger is that heritage becomes fast food or a short video: it captures attention but does not necessarily encourage deeper reflection on history, social change, local knowledge, or human experience," adds the expert.
Sitting on small plastic stools in front of a street vendor selling dumplings, a Turkish couple takes hurried sips of iced tea. They have arrived at Wangxian Valley after visiting several Chinese cities and, like all foreign visitors one encounters here, they discovered the place through social media. "We saw videos and thought it was too beautiful to be real," she says with a laugh. "And when you get here, you understand that authenticity doesn't matter much either. It's spectacular." Her partner agrees: "It's like stepping into a Disney set".
Their words reflect a transformation in Chinese tourism strategy. For years, the vast majority of visitors to these complexes were locals. Now, as Beijing tries to rebuild its external image and relax visa-free entry for numerous countries, more and more foreigners are incorporating these fake cities into their itineraries. In this soft power offensive, social media is fundamental. Provincial governments and tourist organizations organize trips for foreign content creators, inviting them to explore idyllic landscapes, taste local dishes, and broadcast to millions of followers a seductive image of the country. Influencers from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or Europe have become ambassadors of this new narrative of charm. Their videos rarely dwell on whether a city is 500 years old or five. What matters is that the frame works and that the Moon over the mountain still looks, for a few seconds, absolutely authentic.
"Reconstruction has been a recurring feature of Chinese history long before the 20th century. Cities, temples, palaces, and historic neighborhoods have been destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly due to wars, fires, natural disasters, political changes, and urban development processes. In this sense, reconstruction is not only a commercial activity but also a cultural and political practice. It reflects efforts to reconnect with certain versions of the past and create a sense of continuity in the present," explains Professor Yujie.
After the Japanese invasion, the civil war, the revolutionary fervor, and the turbulent Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong, during which countless temples, mansions, and relics were destroyed in the name of socialist modernity, a new China emerged thanks to the economic reforms of the reformist Deng Xiaoping. This was added to the urbanization fever that began in the late 1990s.
In the Asian country, the State formally owns all urban land. Citizens acquire usage rights, but not full ownership. This has allowed local administrations to drive urban redevelopment projects with enormous coercive power. Residents can be displaced through expropriations. Thus, entire historic neighborhoods disappeared under excavators. In their place emerged shopping centers, developments, and monumental avenues... And new ancient cities.
Away from Wangxian Valley, one of the paradigmatic examples is Datong, in the Shanxi province. Extensive urban areas were demolished there to rebuild an idealized historic city. Walls. Monumental gates. Palaces. Temples. All impeccable. All new. Even original structures with centuries of history were sacrificed to create more perfect replicas. The result once sparked a small national debate between preserving unprofitable ruins or building a spectacular past capable of attracting tourists.
Now, the tension between authenticity and profitability has vanished. For Chinese visitors, the emotional experience matters more than material authenticity. The popular hutongs of Beijing - traditional alleys of the capital - offer another example. For the 2008 Olympics, huge sections of these neighborhoods disappeared. Some areas were preserved and beautified. Others were transformed into themed versions of old Beijing. A Spanish journalist visited a rehabilitated siheyuan - a set of buildings built around a central square courtyard - a few years later and found, among historical photographs, a portrait of the then Mayor of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, during an official visit. Architectural authenticity coexisted unabashedly with political narrative and tourist scenery.
Wangxian Valley is the extreme representation of this phenomenon. It is not about the reconstruction of a historic neighborhood, but the transformation of an old mine into a theme park. Just like Furong, another tourist town in the interior of the country. Thanks to its waterfalls and illuminated buildings, it has become a phenomenon, with entire buses of national and foreign visitors guided by perfectly choreographed itineraries now reaching it. Local officials argue that spectacularization thus becomes a tool for regional development. Tourism creates jobs, activates investment, and redistributes flows to less favored regions.
More successful is Gubei Water Town. Often promoted as a picturesque ancient water town next to a section of the Great Wall of Beijing, it is actually a recently built, carefully managed, and highly profitable tourist complex.
Sometimes the gamble fails. In the Hunan province, the Old City of Dayong received astronomical investments a decade ago. But the tourists never arrived, and the complex turned into a ghost town.
One of the researchers who has studied ancient towns the most is Chujun Wang, a specialist in Heritage and Tourism at Hokkaido University (Japan), who dedicated her doctoral research precisely to analyzing these recreated complexes. For her, the debate on whether places like Wangxian Valley are authentic or fake is sometimes too simplistic.
«Not only foreign observers, but also the actors involved - from tourists to tourism promoters or displaced residents - use the dichotomy between fake and authentic to interpret these places», she explains. However, she warns that «focusing exclusively on whether a city is real or fake risks overlooking the complexity of the experiences, emotions, and interpretations of those who visit it».
The researcher considers that these projects were fundamentally born with commercial objectives, although in recent years they have increasingly incorporated discourses on cultural revitalization and heritage activation. In the case of Gubei Water Town, Chujun argues that the question depends on how cultural continuity is defined. "If we understand cultural continuity as a reconstruction of Chinese national identity, then yes, we could say it exists," she states. "But if we talk about local culture, the story is very different." According to her, the project involved the relocation of residents, the demolition of the original town, and the breaking of the ties that neighbors had with their own heritage. "In that sense, it is difficult to argue that local cultural continuity has simply been preserved or reconstructed."
Contrary to those who present heritage conservation, tourism, and economic development as incompatible objectives, Chujun recalls that China has been using tourism for decades as a tool to reconcile heritage protection with the growth of local economies. «I do not consider these three elements to be inherently contradictory», she points out.
The real challenge, she adds, is to prevent economic development from subordinating other aspects of social life or the natural environment. And she rejects the idea that there is a perfect formula to resolve that tension. «I do not believe there is anything like an ideal balance, because culture is constantly changing. Even restoring a heritage asset to its original state is, in a sense, a way of transforming it», she concludes. The important thing, she concludes, is to analyze how the commercialization and transformation of heritage affect people's lives and the environment, and reflect on how these processes can contribute to the general well-being of society.