Lvxing Base’s 200,000 square metre facility in Hangzhou, opened in 2024, is where engineers recreate typhoons and mudslides for a generation of travellers who want to feel, not just see, what extreme weather can do. The company’s simulated disaster experiences have gone viral on Chinese social media, and China’s disaster simulation industry is scaling up fast to meet the demand.
The experience is built to be physically demanding. Leon Lv, a 28-year-old from Chongqing in south-west China, travelled more than 1,300km to Hangzhou to join a group of 20 in a typhoon-fuelled flooding scenario, in which hundreds of tonnes of water swept people off their feet and carried them towards a safety barrier. Her mind momentarily went blank as the surge hit, she says, and she forgot she was in a simulation. “One thing I learned is how to stay calm and protect myself during a flood. I learned how to use the right body position to stay safe,” she says. “No book and no school [can] teach me like that.”
Additional reference context is available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/17/china-tourists-fake-typhoon-experience-dark-tourism.
The company’s founders spent 10 years making documentaries in some of the world’s most extreme environments before turning that knowledge into a commercial service. General manager Wang Kuanghan is candid about the mix of motivations among visitors. “I don’t deny that many people come because they want excitement,” he says. They want to see what the place is like, what a real typhoon and torrential rain feel like, and whether they themselves can withstand it. Most individual customers, he notes, are between 20 and 30 years old.
Delivery is now the industry’s main preoccupation. Lvxing Base plans to open five more centres across China within the next three years, and to add earthquake and fire simulations to its repertoire. The public sector is building alongside it. At Beijing’s Haidian public safety museum, tourists experience simulated earthquakes, tsunamis and fires through a 4D theatre equipped with moving platforms and sound effects. Last year the southern city of Guangzhou opened a five-storey centre to teach visitors how to respond to emergencies and disasters; its earthquake simulator can recreate ground shaking equivalent to a 7.2 magnitude quake.
The buildout follows explicit government direction. In 2024, local governments were instructed to promote immersive disaster education, with safety centres, museums and training bases told to use simulations to teach people how to respond in a real crisis. The policy context is a country where extreme weather has become increasingly common. In 2025, China recorded its highest number of hot days since records began and was hit by 10 typhoons, well above the long-term annual average. The ministry of emergencies reported that 67 million people were affected by such disasters across the country.
Meanwhile, interest is being amplified online. Phrases such as “paying to suffer” and “paying to buy fear” are trending across Chinese social platforms as part of a wave of enthusiasm for experiences known as “dark tourism”. Leon Lv found her way in through RedNote, where the algorithm served her videos of people struggling to survive typhoon-strength winds and flash floods. “I never experienced a typhoon. I don’t know how it will feel and what will happen. I just have seen it on the news,” she says. “So that’s why I want to go there to have a safe place to experience it and learn something.”
Not everyone is content with simulation. Some travellers are heading to real sites of death and destruction. In May 2008, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake devastated towns in Sichuan province, killing more than 70,000 people. Alice, a 30-year-old writer from Sichuan whose name has been changed, walked around Beichuan, one of the affected towns, whose ruins the government preserved with metal beams holding collapsed buildings in place for public visits. She saw the site where schools collapsed, crushing students inside. In Yingxue, close to the epicentre, a broken clock surrounded by the remains of a middle school is frozen at 2.28, the moment the earthquake struck. “I felt scared because of the power of nature and how many children and students could not escape from it,” she says. “Everything was so broken. It became like a ghost town, because nobody lives in the old town any more.” Alice believes dark tourism helps a country reconcile with its past, even if the government decides what can be remembered, and she plans to start a Chinese language Substack account detailing her journeys into tragedy.
Tour guide Samantha Wang has seen a parallel rise in attendance at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, where the Japanese Imperial army captured the city in 1937 and Chinese official accounts say 300,000 civilians and soldiers were killed over weeks of massacres. Japan’s official position is that it acknowledges large numbers of civilians were killed but says the number of victims is “difficult to determine”. Entry to the hall is free but tourists must book online, and the local government reserves 25,000 places a day. In August, tickets are frequently sold out in advance, she says. “There are more tragic sites in China, and I see more people interested to know about that. That’s a new trend,” says Wang, who observes that visitors feel sad seeing photos of victims, including children who were killed, but afterwards feel relieved and encouraged to work harder to make China stronger.
Robert Li, director of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, frames the shift simply: the new generation of Chinese travellers want to experience a place rather than simply see famous attractions. Whether the demand is met by simulation centres, public safety museums or preserved ruins, the operators building and running these sites now face the same test: keeping delivery, safety and access in step with a rapidly growing audience.