Two Years After Filming, a Youku Reality Show's Props Are Still Littering a Hainan Beach

A video blogger out collecting litter on the beach at Shenzhou Peninsula, on Hainan's east coast, with a child in tow, started finding things that were not exactly litter: a prop sign reading "wave coins reset to zero" (浪花币清零)， a contraption that looked like a water bicycle, and the other leftovers of a television production. The props, it turned out, belonged to "This Is My Island" (这是我的岛)， a Youku reality show filmed on the spot in 2024 — and, as far as anyone could tell, never collected. A repost of the discovery by the Weibo account 程序员那些破事 was liked more than 6,000 times by Sunday, under the question everyone kept asking: does a film crew just leave an island like this?

By Sunday the story had reached the news rankings, and that afternoon the show's production side had answered. Staff at Orca Entertainment Group (虎鲸文娱)， Youku's parent company, told The Paper that the production team had coordinated garbage removal with the property manager at Shenzhou Peninsula, and that the debris traced back to the dismantling of the set after filming wrapped. Two years after that dismantling, the props are still in the sand.

The item that has drawn the most ire is the sign in the photographs: a piece of game dressing for a show whose contestants competed in island challenges, now weathering in a scrubby patch behind the dunes. The blogger noted in the video that the debris, sitting at the top of a beach on a tourism coast, could leach into the water and affect seafood safety. Whether that specific risk materialises is unknowable from a phone video; the more grounded point underneath it is simpler. Somebody put all this here, and somebody else was supposed to take it away.

The episode lands in a running Chinese argument about what variety-show production costs the places it borrows. The boom in reality shows filmed on location has left beaches, villages and nature reserves playing host to film crews, and the comment sections under this story were less interested in the specific show than in the pattern: commenters asked why local authorities had never intervened on a beach used for tourism, and how many other "temporary" sets were still out there past the wrap party. The show itself has faded from memory — one commenter admitted having watched it and remembered nothing about it, which did not stop it leaving a beach's worth of dressing behind.

What happens next is the unremarkable part of the story and, to the people doing it, the important part: a property manager, a production company and a beach that still needs cleaning. The Paper's report closed with Youku's parent saying the crew had gone to the site to check it — 排查， in the company's phrasing, an inspection that begins, two years late, with what is left of the set.