HENAN, Central China — Sweat stings Huagu’s eyes again.

He slips a tissue from his sleeve, dabs quickly beneath the wig, and hides it away. By the time the next tourist hands him a phone, he is smiling again, wrist already turning into the practiced angle that produces a flawless clip. Another video, another souvenir destined for social media.

By nightfall, he will have repeated the loop hundreds of times, each gesture performed during the hottest July in central China’s Henan province since records began in 1961. His robes, he says, “feel like carrying a blanket.” Still, the 25-year-old beams at every passerby.

Welcome to Wansui Mountain Martial Arts City in Henan’s Kaifeng City, where more than 2,000 costumed actors move through the streets as “non-playable characters,” or NPCs — a term that originated in the West to describe side characters in role-playing table-top and video games but has been recast in China to describe character performers.

They duel, flirt, and banter their way through storylines drawn from wuxia — China’s martial-arts fantasy tradition — pulling visitors into the spectacle. Every scene is built for the camera, every exchange meant to end up online.

And beneath it all runs the same unspoken rule: no visitor should ever leave with a complaint.

In recent years, Wansui has been among the most successful experiments in China’s booming immersive tourism industry. From morning until late at night, the park stages more than 3,000 shows a day, with attendance climbing to 50,000 on ordinary days and hundreds of thousands during peaks.

Revenue has almost tripled since 2022, and is on track to top 1.1 billion yuan ($155 million) this year, making Wansui a model others across the country are scrambling to imitate.

But its success depends above all on the people hired to perform it: costumed workers whose endless duels, dances, and staged affections turn martial-arts fantasy into a business.

Life in costume

The makeup alone takes two hours. White base, sharp eyeliner, nose shadow, and a long white wig. Huagu finishes dressing in the breakroom, then pushes open the door. Outside, the heat waits. So do the tourists.

“Hi there. Please step forward,” he says to the first visitor, as the loop begins again. Around him, a dozen other NPCs repeat the same motions: cameras panning, wrists twisting, smiles fixed in place.

Huagu’s real name is Wang Yang, but he prefers to be called by his stage name, Huagu, which means “to become a valley.” He explains it as a metaphor for being natural and unforced: welcoming those who come, and letting go of those who leave.

When Sixth Tone visited Wansui, Huagu was playing Wang Ye, a Taoist apprentice from Wudang Mountain, China’s most famous Taoist sanctuary, and a main character from the webcomic “Hitori no Shita: The Outcast.”

In this role, he guided tourists through a simple tai chi routine, rewarding anyone who managed the sequence with a silver bill, the park’s in-game currency.

At other NPC stations across the park, bills can be won by singing, dancing, or performing dares. “Mine is for visitors who don’t have talents like that,” Huagu says. “You have to think about everyone. Some people have poor coordination; others have thin skins.”

Becoming an NPC has little to do with a flawless face. Filters polish the videos, and paint or wigs can turn almost anyone into a celestial beauty. Recruitment posters make the standards plain: adults only, at least 165 centimeters for women, 175 for men.

Still, Huagu follows stricter rules: dieting to stay slim, avoiding spicy food to prevent acne breakouts, and staying single to preserve what he calls his “commercial value.”

The discipline sustains the park’s larger illusion, a world built on endless spectacle, repetition, and speed. Each day, 2,000 performers stage thousands of skits, from kung fu duels set to Billie Eilish tunes to fairies or princesses breaking into K-pop choreography. And tourists are always part of the act.

Visitors can even “steal” the park’s silver bills — until guards in Song dynasty-era uniforms haul them off in mock arrest, paraded through the streets to laughter and shame.

The chaos is calculated. Visitors now spend an average of nine hours in Wansui — far longer than at most parks — and those who meet NPCs often stay longer, or return.

To feed this loop, NPCs work six days a week, often six to eight hours per shift, each covering multiple roles. Apart from hours in makeup and short breaks, nearly all their time is spent outdoors, come heat or cold.

Park authorities state, however, that multiple measures implemented this summer are sufficient, pointing to misting systems, ice deliveries, quick-dry costumes, and air-conditioned lounges.

When Wang Gang first joined Wansui Mountain in 2008, skits ran only on holidays. Now, at 38, he spends at least nine hours a day in costume, cycling through more than a dozen shows. “There’s hardly an off-season anymore,” he says. “The shows are nonstop. The crowd just pushes you along. It feels like an assembly line.”

With thousands of tourists and cameras rolling each day, every performance must land instantly, ready to be clipped and shared online. Wang studies internet memes each day; storylines are rewritten to chase whatever is trending. “Audiences prefer the most dramatic, straightforward plots,” he explains.

Even offstage, the cameras keep rolling. Performers spend breaks filming short clips, then livestream several times a week, their handles printed on name tags or collectible cards with QR codes.

“On the one hand, it builds audience loyalty, and on the other, it gives them extra money,” says one park official.

But what keeps fans coming back is the sense of being noticed, of being cared for, a trade in affection that performers say is the hardest part of all.

Manufactured intimacy

At Wansui Mountain, some of the most viral clips hinge on this staged intimacy: NPCs locking eyes with visitors, hugging them, even leaning in as if to kiss. “It’s like playing the role of their other half,” says Huagu.

“At first, visitors asked, ‘Can I touch your face? Can you kiss my hand?’ I was like, what?” he recalls. “Later, I learned this is how the job works. So I watched videos of other NPCs, studied them, and practiced.”

Yeye, 20, was cast last year as the Moon Goddess, one of the lead roles at Wansui’s fantasy parade. Twice a day, she rides a float wearing a jeweled crown and holding a silver scepter, leaning down to high-five tourists or shaping hearts with her hands.

Fans chant her name; others travel across China just to see her, the devotion often spilling offline.

On her days off, strangers stop her in the street. “I can’t even tell who’s who sometimes,” she says. “But you can’t make anyone feel unseen. You have to treat them like friends.”

Unlike performers at some theme parks, who must stay in character, NPCs at Wansui can bend the rules. They don’t have to ignore phones in their faces, and if a visitor asks, they might even break into the latest viral dance on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, while still in full costume.

These rules make them more accessible, yet blur the line between role and self.

Huagu remembers one fan asking him to scoop her up in his arms in a princess carry. He refused. “I’m not able to carry everyone, and once I fail, people might think it’s because they’re too heavy,” he told the fan. “So it’s not that I won’t do it for you. I won’t do it for anyone. That’s fair.” He never saw the fan again.

Another kept sending messages, pressing him to be her boyfriend. “I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, my job doesn’t allow it,’” he says. After weeks of harassment, he shut down private messages across all his accounts.

Sometimes the line vanishes. In July, “Blue Fox,” one of the park’s most popular NPCs, was fired after beginning an affair with a fan. A month later, several tourists put another NPC in a chokehold while trying to snatch silver bills.

When Yeye began dating another lead performer earlier this year, most fans cheered the couple. Some even traveled to the park just to see them together.

But in August, when her boyfriend refused a tourist’s request to film a hand-holding video, the visitor posted online: “If you’re an NPC, you shouldn’t be dating anyone.” Since then, the two no longer pose together during photo sessions.

Performers describe a looser reality. The park shifts its rules as often as the trends: early this year, physical-contact videos with fans were banned outright, only to quietly return weeks later. Recently, several NPCs even told fans on social media that new notices ban “intimate interactions” again.

When one NPC asked a park official for clarity, the reply was vague: “It’s still about the visitors. As long as it doesn’t go too far.”

The park later said that comment did not reflect its position, only stating that “all NPCs follow clear performance and interaction guidelines.” It added that visitors are also given reminders.

“Providing emotional value is reasonable,” Huagu says. “But it has to be built on clear boundaries. That’s the way the NPC business works.”

Dream work

Before finding his way to this “business,” Huagu had tried almost everything he could find: modeling, acting, fitness coaching, selling dolls, moxibustion kits, even selling Lego sets. “What should I do? What do I want?” were questions that have followed him since middle school, he says.

He grew up in the southeastern part of Henan, one of China’s toughest provinces for the gaokao, China’s grueling national college entrance exam. At 15 he moved north, hoping the pressure would ease, and threw himself into track and field for extra points on the exam.

He scraped into a junior college with a major in tai chi — a subject, he admits, he had “no idea how to turn into a job.”

At 1.95 meters, he felt his height was his only advantage. He typed into a search bar: “what jobs can tall people do?” The answer was modeling. He moved to Shanghai, signed with an agency, rented a windowless room, and tried to make it work. Within a year, the pandemic brought his career to a standstill.

While working as a sales clerk at another amusement park, he was struck by the performers. “They gave people a kind of warmth. I wanted to be like them,” he says.

So when he saw a recruitment ad for NPCs at Wansui last September, he applied. It offered 5,000 yuan a month, nearly twice the local average, plus social insurance for long-term performers — far better than anything he had found drifting between cities.

In an increasingly competitive job market across the country, more young Chinese are making the same calculation. NPC work offers what many entry-level jobs do not: steady pay, a contract, and the chance to stay close to home. Some parks have even begun signing agreements with vocational colleges to funnel graduates directly into NPC roles.

Operators like Jinshang Tianhua — who designs Wansui’s “Fantasy Land,” where Huagu and Yeye work — frame their mission bluntly as “solving employment.” On its website, the company declares: “Mission: to give rural youngsters jobs.” It claims the 17 “cities” it operates directly employ 17,000 people, with another 150,000 in indirect jobs.

Many NPCs also supplement their pay through livestreams. On Douyin, fans send virtual gifts that can translate into thousands of yuan. Huagu and Yeye both stream regularly, keeping up ties with fans they first met inside the park.

Often, those fan exchanges matter as much as the staged skits.

Fans tell Huagu about quarrels with parents, the stress of boarding school, or the grief of losing a pet. He listens and offers comfort when he can. “They’re all ordinary people’s worries,” he says. “I don’t have great abilities. At most, I can walk with them for a while when they’re lost.”

In August, one fan — 18-year-old Yaya from Shandong, eastern China — traveled to Kaifeng to see Huagu again. Months earlier, during a quarrel with her parents, he had stopped her, asked why she was upset, guided her through a game, and handed her a cookie as a prize.

Huagu, having lived apart from his own parents, recognized her anger. After failing to build a life in Shanghai, he says he too was scolded for not “making it” in a big city. “Everyone needs some kind of strength to keep going,” he says. “It’s like I’ve been caught in the rain, so I want to hold up an umbrella for others.”

Later, Yaya sent him a letter: “For you it was just a routine interaction. For me it was a hidden gem in a rushed afternoon. Keep shining your light on more visitors in your own way.”

For others, the payoff comes in front of the crowd. Wang Gang, the veteran, says his favorite moment is when a punchline lands and laughter comes back in a wave, “that instant call-and-response.”

Yeye feels the same. “I find interacting with visitors much easier than dancing on stage,” she says. “Sometimes we set off tired, or it’s just too hot and we’re in a bad mood. But visitors give us emotional energy, too.”

That night, as Yeye’s final parade closed, a fan shouted from the crowd: “Yeye, you’re so beautiful!” She broke into a smile, turning toward the sea of faces. Visitors lined up for photos with their favorite NPCs before drifting toward the gates.

By late evening, the park was still glowing, skits echoing over the loudspeakers, laser lights cutting the sky. Then the NPCs slipped out with the crowd, past tricycle drivers at the gate, vanishing into the city.

Morning will bring the loop again: costumes, skits, the practiced gestures captured on a hundred phones. Perhaps that is why Huagu clings to his stage name, a reminder to welcome those who come, and release those who go.

“There’s nothing special,” he says on his way out. “It’s like setting down a glass of water after drinking. You finish, and you put it back where it belongs.”

Editor: Apurva.

(Header image: An NPC playing the Moon Goddess’s handmaiden high-fives visitors during a parade at Wansui Mountain Martial Arts City in Kaifeng, Henan province, August 2025. Jiang Xinyi/Sixth Tone)