A town built to feed a steelworks
The streets are still a town grid, the layout of a settlement built around the mine. Shitanjing is a subdistrict of Dawukou District, set inside the Helan Mountains. Three communities remain on the civil register: Wenhua Street, Xinhua Street, and Hongguang Street. In 1958 the state began investing in the mine area so that it could supply Jiuquan Iron and Steel. Shitanjing District was established in 1970 and became Shizuishan's second urban district. In 2002 that district was abolished, and the place was renamed Shitanjing Subdistrict. Locally the ground is still called the Helan hundred-li mining area.
What stays in view is the mining administrative town of the 1960s through the 1990s. Factories, schools, hospitals, and housing stood with the streets, a station, and a railway. The district title ended in 2002. The three street names are the administrative remainder.
A hundred and fifty-seven residents
Shitanjing covers 356 square kilometres, with a built-up area of 7.6 square kilometres. In 2025 the city counts 94 households and 157 residents here. No peak population is recorded from the years when Shitanjing was still its own district. Dawukou's resident population is a different count, about 298,300 at the end of 2023, for the whole district. The 157 belong to Shitanjing itself.
Film crews reuse the same streets without erasing the register: households, residents, and spending from productions remain on record. A 2024 approval covers 227.62 hectares of historical mine restoration around the subdistrict, and the construction window runs from October 2024 to October 2026. Inside that window, parts of the ground may still be a work site.
Crews in the idle rooms
Dawukou is building Shitanjing as a base for realist film. Ningxia Coal's Shitanjing coking-coal branch released idle apartment and canteen buildings, since converted into housing for actors and a central kitchen. Hongguang Market, the former Xinhua Department Store, and a former welfare factory serve as prop stores. A local extras guild recruits residents. Productions shot here include Home Coming (万里归途), My Father Jiao Yulu (我的父亲焦裕禄), Minning Town (山海情), and Flames in the Wind (风中的火焰). Seventy percent of the scenes in the 2022 National Day film Home Coming were taken in Shitanjing, and the film took 1.6 billion yuan at the box office.
In August 2024 the Beijing Film Academy opened a practice base there. Three further productions were shot in 2024: Welcome to the Dragon Restaurant (欢迎来龙餐馆), A Place to Use Force (用武之地), and 宣战之毒殇. Extras work totals 12,000 person-times, at 80 to 120 yuan a person a day. Shitanjing does not appear among Shizuishan's A-level scenic areas on the list current through September 2024. Dawukou's 3A industrial rating belongs to the washery park, not these streets. Whether the pits, closed plants, or sets are open to the public is not stated.