Back in 1961, when Zhang Xianliang stumbled upon the clay walls of the old fortress rising 10 metres out of the sand in the middle of an endless stretch of the Gobi near out in the north central Chinese wilderness, he told himself that here was the ideal location for some sort of Hollywood-like studio.
But Mr Zhang was a penniless young man who had just been released from a labour re-education camp in the Chinese gulag in the remote Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a Muslim area. He had been sent there for the political crime of being a 'rightist' and afterwards was given another job at a nearby state farm. He never got enough to eat, the winters were bitterly cold, and the summers incredibly hot.
Forty years later, he is comfortably seated in a teakwood chair polished to a high gloss, in a comfortable room, inside a traditional Chinese courtyard house that has been built within the rough walls of that fortress. Mr Zhang is now the owner of the West China Film Studio, which is in control of two ruined fortresses. 'There are few people in the world who could make such a wild dream come true like this one,' he says, smiling.
What makes the story even more unusual is that the studio is really just a hobby. By the 1980s he had already won fame nationwide for his novels based on the tragic lost years of the labour camp and the state farm. He is still the proud chairman of the Ningxia Writer's Association and an adviser on literary affairs to the central government.
Soul and Flesh
In 1981, the film director Xie Jin decided to adapt Mr Zhang's semi-autobiography novel 'Soul and Flesh' to the big screen and the writer naturally suggested that scenes be shot in the fortress, as describes in his novel. After that, the clay forts took on a new life as the site of some of China's best contemporary film offerings. Prominent directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige and film starts like Gong Li and Jiang Wen all put in appearances there.