Tourists pay money to experience a "fake tornado" in China

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In a strange experience of its kind, a number of tourists paid money to experience a "fake hurricane", on a trip that begins with booking a ticket and ends amid strong winds and torrential waters.

Between these two moments, tourists in China go through an experience that they voluntarily pay for, in order to face an artificial natural disaster, in search of excitement and lessons that might help them survive when the danger becomes real.

With the spread of clips of these experiences on social media platforms, the demand for simulating hurricanes and floods has increased in parallel with a broader interest in dark tourism, which leads other visitors to sites that witnessed historical disasters and tragedies, according to the Guardian newspaper.

Among those searching for this experience is 28-year-old Leon Love, whose clips on the Red Note app prompted her to travel more than 1,300 kilometers, from Chongqing to Hangzhou, to participate in a flood simulation caused by a hurricane, where she joined a group of 20 people, before hundreds of tons of water pushed them towards a safety barrier.

But as her excitement intensified, Leon momentarily lost sight of the fact that she was inside a simulation, and found herself preoccupied with how to maintain her balance and protect her body.

Although she had never witnessed a hurricane before, the experience, according to her account, gave her practical knowledge of how to remain calm and maintain a safe position during a flood.

The company behind these experiments is Luxing Peace, whose founders spent ten years filming documentaries in extremely harsh environments, then transferred some of that experience to the facility in Hangzhou.

Since its opening in 2024, on an area of ​​200,000 square metres, the facility has provided simulations of hurricanes and mudslides.

While its general manager, Wang Kuang Han, said, “Many come out of curiosity and to test their resilience, while most individual visitors are between 20 and 30 years old.”

So in response to this demand, the company plans to open five additional centers within three years, and add earthquake and fire simulations.

Public institutions also presented similar experiments, including a public safety museum in Beijing and a center in Guangzhou that simulated a 7.2-magnitude earthquake.

This trend is gaining importance with the increase in extreme weather phenomena, as about 67 million people will be affected by disasters in China in 2025, according to the Ministry of Emergency Management. In 2024, the authorities had directed the use of simulation to enhance awareness of behavior during crises.

In addition to the artificial experiences, travelers headed to the sites of the tragedies themselves. Robert Lee, Director of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, linked this to the new generation's desire to have experiences that go beyond sightseeing.

In this context, the writer Alice visited towns destroyed by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed more than 70,000 people.

Between the collapsed buildings of Beichuan and a clock that stopped in Yingxiu at the moment of the earthquake, she conjured the fate of the children who did not survive.

In turn, guide Samantha Wang observed an increasing demand for the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, as tickets for the visit often sell out during August, in an extension of an interest that combines learning about history and being affected by its tragedies.