A town with a film for a name

The town kept one name for centuries and traded it for a film. Wangcun — the Wang family village — was a market town of Yongshun county in the west of the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, a settlement of the country between the prefecture's two great rivers, the Wushui and the Youshui, where the paths down from the slopes met the water and the boats. Market towns of this kind lived by their position, and their whole public life ran along one street: the ground where grain, oil, animals and news changed hands on the appointed days, with the shops and storehouses of the traders fronting it and the households behind and above. That street was the town, and when the film industry went looking in the 1980s for a small Hunan town that could stand for every small Hunan town, this street could — it had been playing the role for generations before anyone thought to point a camera at it. The production that arrived used the street as itself, unchanged: the setting of a story about market traders and the decades of political weather they lived through. The street's bones are a market town's bones still; what changed is who comes to walk them, and why.

The name change is documented to the year. In 2007 the town of Wangcun was renamed Furong — the hibiscus — because the film Hibiscus Town had been shot on its streets, and the place has carried the film's title ever since. The film, released in 1986, was directed by Xie Jin and starred Liu Xiaoqing and Jiang Wen, two of the most closely watched actors of the decade; it adapted Gu Hua's novel of the same name, a significant work of the literature that followed the Cultural Revolution, which follows a young woman who runs a rice-tofu stall in a small Hunan town through the campaigns that sweep over her. Xie Jin shot the adaptation on location here, so the town's actual lanes and steps are the film's geography — a rare case of a Chinese literary film whose set remained wholly inhabited, and whose title eventually replaced the set's own name. The rename, made formal by the county, was less a tribute than an administrative recognition of what had already happened: two decades of visitors arriving to find Hibiscus Town and finding Wangcun instead. A Taiwanese television adaptation followed in 1989, extending the title's life in another medium; the town, for its part, kept the original.

The film economy and the town's daily life share the same street now, and the state has built for both. In December 2021 the high-speed line from Zhangjiajie through Jishou to Huaihua opened, and the towns it serves read as a list of Xiangxi's destinations: official writing describes the line as stringing Zhangjiajie, Furong Town and the old city of Fenghuang into a single sightseeing corridor through the Wuling mountains. The name the town took in 2007 is the brand it trades on; the hibiscus on the maps is the film's hibiscus, and the visitors who come for the movie find a functioning county town around the set — the farming of the Yongshun uplands, the markets, the households whose connection to the story is that it was filmed outside their doors. Two names and two economies sit on top of each other here. Wangcun remains the town's other name, the one the film crew arrived to and the one the county records kept; Furong is the one they left behind. Few places anywhere have had their identity so thoroughly edited by a single production, and the town's present task — forty years on — is keeping the two names, and the two lives they name, on speaking terms.