Wuxi's Three Kingdoms city: what a television set looks like at thirty-five

On the eastern shore of Lake Tai (太湖 Tàihú), a couple of hours from Shanghai door to door, stands a walled city that was never meant to outlive its television series. It has now stood far longer than the show it was built for ran, been repaired more than once, and is still, most weeks, a working set.

What was built here

China Central Television put up two adjacent cities on this shoreline in the late 1980s and 1990s — 三国城 (Sānguóchéng, Three Kingdoms City) and 水浒城 (Shuǐhǔchéng, Water Margin City) — for its long adaptations of the two novels. The scale was decided by camera lenses rather than by history: gate towers tall enough to fill a frame, a parade ground wide enough for cavalry, wooden warships moored where the lake could stand in for the Yangtze.

How to read a thirty-five-year-old set

Sets age differently from buildings. Walk close to a gate tower and the render has crazed into a grey no art department would have mixed, while timber stained dark in the early nineties has gone silver on the weather side. Look at the backs, too, at the parts the camera never took: some facades stop after a metre of unpainted block and are propped from behind, which is the most honest thing on the site.

Going, and what you may not see

Take a high-speed train to Wuxi (无锡 Wúxī), then a bus or taxi out to the lake. Crews still book the place, so a lane may be roped off without explanation and a courtyard closed for the morning; staff at the barrier will usually tell you when it reopens. Weekday mornings outside the summer holiday are quietest, and the staged battle performances are posted on a board inside the gate rather than anywhere online.

A set that keeps working is not a ruin. It is a building with a job.

这里的城墙是为镜头造的，不是为战争造的。