Why Middle-Aged Chinese Women Are Paying to Be Empress Dowagers at Hengdian
For 388 yuan, Hengdian World Studios will turn an ordinary visitor into the lead of their own short drama. The studio's longest-serving customers are older Chinese women who spent decades watching palace dramas — and are now paying to play the empress.
For 388 yuan — about 55 US dollars — the world's largest film studio will make you its next star. At Hengdian World Studios in Zhejiang province, a walk-in package launched in August puts an ordinary tourist through a professional pipeline: director, camera crew, costume and makeup, post-production, and a few minutes of your own vertical-screen mini-drama to take home. Young visitors coined the phrase that went with it — "Hengdian landing visa," as in, you land and are instantly on a set. By early September more than 2,000 people had done it, the topic had passed 350 million views, and on peak days more than 1,200 visitors were filming.
But the studio's most faithful customers are not the ones who made it viral. Staff put older visitors at 60 to 70 per cent of the experience-filming trade over the past several years — and among them, women are the most active. Baidu's trending board distilled the phenomenon this week into a single line: pay to be the Empress Dowager, Hengdian is packed.
The demographic logic is the story. Today's middle-aged and older Chinese women grew up when palace drama dominated television — "My Fair Princess" and its many heirs — and spent decades as the audience for stories in which a woman their age was either a dowager or a villain. The Ming-Qing Palace Gardens, the full-scale set where many of those dramas were shot, is now where they go to be written into the genre. The reporter from Nanfeng Chuang magazine who spent September at the studios put it plainly: they come to briefly become the protagonist of a story.
It is tourism built on the short-drama boom — the same vertical-screen industry that now supplies most of China's micro-dramas, nine in ten of which the regulator said this month are made substantially with AI. The studios that once rented their backlots to production companies are selling the prop closet to the public, at price points from a 200-yuan half-hour shoot to the full "join the crew" treatment. For the women in the golden gowns, the transaction is easier to name than either: this is the "pleasing yourself" economy — spending on an experience that exists to make you visible.
The trial team that set the experience up in August expected a handful of takers; it passed 2,000 participants within five weeks. The women in the Qing-dynasty gowns, though, had been coming for years before the package had a name.