Chinese travellers are increasingly paying to experience simulated natural disasters and visit sites of tragedy, as interest grows in a form of travel known as “dark tourism”.
A tourist travelled over 1,300km from Chongqing in south-west China to Hangzhou in the east last year to participate in a disaster simulation after watching videos of typhoons and flash floods on the Chinese social media platform RedNote.
“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 told The Guardian. “So that’s why I want to go there to have a safe place to experience it and learn something.”
She joined 20 other participants in a simulated flood scenario involving hundreds of tonnes of water. As the surge swept people towards a safety barrier, she briefly forgot that the experience was staged.
“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. No book and no school [can] teach me like that.”
Phrases such as “paying to suffer” and “paying to buy fear” have gained traction on Chinese social media, reflecting growing interest in immersive experiences involving danger and disaster, reports The Guardian.
One company capitalising on the trend is Lvxing Base, based in Hangzhou. Its founders spent 10 years making documentaries in some of the world's most extreme environments before establishing a 200,000-square-metre facility in 2024 to recreate disasters such as typhoons and mudslides.
General Manager Wang Kuanghan said many visitors were drawn by the thrill of experiencing extreme conditions and testing their ability to withstand them, according to The Guardian.
The company plans to establish five more centres across China over the next three years, with earthquake and fire simulations also in the pipeline.
Similar experiences are available at public facilities. Beijing's Haidian public safety museum uses a 4D theatre with moving platforms and sound effects to simulate earthquakes, tsunamis, and fires.
The Guardian reports that Guangzhou opened a five-storey centre in 2025 to teach visitors how to respond to emergencies, including an earthquake simulator that can recreate shaking equivalent to a magnitude 7.2 quake.
The growing interest comes as China faces increasingly frequent extreme weather events.
The country recorded its highest number of hot days since records began in 2025 and was struck by 10 typhoons, well above the long-term annual average, The Guardian reports.
China's emergency management ministry reported that 67 million people were affected by disasters across the country.
In 2024, local governments were instructed to promote immersive disaster education, encouraging safety centres, museums, and training facilities to use simulations to prepare people for real emergencies.
Robert Li, director of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said younger Chinese travellers increasingly wanted to experience destinations rather than simply visit famous attractions, according to The Guardian.
Some, however, are moving beyond simulated disasters to visit places where real tragedies occurred.
A 30-year-old writer from Sichuan visited Beichuan, one of the towns devastated by the magnitude 8.0 earthquake that struck the province in May 2008, killing more than 70,000 people.
The government has preserved the ruins, with metal supports holding damaged buildings in place for visitors.
She also visited the remains of a middle school in Yingxue, near the epicentre, where a broken clock remains frozen at 2.28pm, the time the earthquake struck.
“I felt scared because of the power of nature and how many children and students could not escape from it,” she told The Guardian.
“Everything was so broken. It became like a ghost town, because nobody lives in the old town any more.”
She believes dark tourism can help a country come to terms with its past, even when the government determines which parts of history are preserved and remembered.
A tour guide reports growing interest among Chinese tourists in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, which commemorates atrocities committed after Japanese forces captured Nanjing in 1937.
Chinese official accounts say 300,000 civilians and soldiers were killed during weeks of massacres.
Photographs of victims line the memorial hall, leaving many visitors visibly saddened, particularly by images of children killed in the massacre.