Two compounds at the mountain foot
Zhenbeibu Town stands in Xixia District, at the eastern foot of the Helan Mountains. Two fortress compounds occupy the ground, Ming and Qing border posts later reused as a film studio. Fortress walls, gates and courtyards are what a visitor meets. Some of them now carry film names. A moon gate in the compounds is tied to Red Sorghum. A set is tied to The Herdsman. Those sets were built for the camera. They are not the Ming appearance of the forts. The dust inside the enclosures has been asked to play a military post and a street of cinema. Old border walls and later scenery share the yards at the mountain foot.
A writer, a moon gate and a hundred films
The writer Zhang Xianliang founded the film city in 1993. The site holds more than 200 important film locations. The address is Zhenbeibu, Xixia District, Yinchuan. More than 100 films have been shot there, among them Red Sorghum, Ashes of Time and A Chinese Odyssey. Those titles name productions that used these compounds; the site also counts more than 200 locations it treats as important—two tallies, not one merged number. The moon gate tied to Red Sorghum is one object a visitor can look for. The Herdsman set is another. Zhang also designed Baihua Hall and paid for it, for the 13th Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival. The hall has a date and a festival attached, which gives it a firmer outline than a slogan. The place is billed as an Eastern Hollywood. The name it answers to is Zhenbeibu Western Film City.
Baihua Hall and the literature of rooms
The State Council and the Ministry of Culture named the site a national cultural-industry demonstration base and a national experimental base for the productive protection of intangible cultural heritage. An exhibition turns Zhang's work into rooms and sets, a digest of what is called his three-dimensional literature. Baihua Hall is the piece with the clearest hand on it: a hall the novelist designed and funded for a numbered film festival. Around it are the moon gate, the herdsman set and the long walls of the two forts. Xixia District also shares the territorial care of the imperial tombs on this same eastern side of the Helan Mountains. Those tombs belong to the Western Xia, a Tangut state of the 11th to 13th centuries. The film city is a later reuse of Ming and Qing compounds. A street dressed for a film, and a moon gate dressed for one, are not the forts as the Ming left them. The film city and the necropolis share a mountain edge and a district, and they keep different centuries in the stone.