For generations, travelers went to Asia to see what had endured.
Temples. Palaces. Gardens. Ancient cities. Great walls.
Increasingly, some travelers are going to see what comes next.
In Shizuoka, Japan, visitors can stand above an operating Bandai factory and watch plastic model components being moulded and packaged. In Ulsan, South Korea, visitors can tour part of Hyundai’s enormous automobile manufacturing complex and see cars progressing through an assembly line before reaching the company’s export port. In Beijing and Shenzhen, foreign entrepreneurs and executives are seeking access to electric-vehicle plants, robotics companies and advanced manufacturing operations.
These aren’t necessarily people interested in traditional industrial tourism.
They’re interested in the future.
And across Asia, the factory floor is becoming an attraction.
Where Gundam Is Actually Made
Shizuoka offers perhaps the most entertaining example.
Bandai Spirits opened a new factory beside its existing Bandai Hobby Center in 2025 to increase production of plastic model kits, including the enormously popular Gundam models known as Gunpla.
But instead of hiding the manufacturing operation behind a warehouse wall, Bandai incorporated visitors into the plan.
The new BANDAI HOBBY CENTER PLAMO DESIGN INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE — mercifully abbreviated BHCPDII — includes a museum from which guests can watch actual production taking place.
Visitors can see moulding and packaging operations through windows overlooking the factory, explore thousands of model kits, learn how products move from concept through design and mould making, and even experiment with designing their own model packaging. A life-sized Gundam model kit monument helps ensure nobody mistakes the place for an ordinary industrial park.
Bandai says that once the new plant reaches full production, its model-kit manufacturing capacity is expected to be approximately 35 percent higher than its fiscal 2024 level. The adjoining museum was refreshed again in September 2026, with expanded accommodation for international visitors and a new Gundam Base Annex. 株式会社バンダイナムコホールディングス
That combination is interesting.
This is a functioning factory built partly to produce more things.
But it has also been designed to show people how those things are made.
For Gundam fans, the attraction isn’t simply seeing another display of something they already love.
It is seeing the moment when fictional culture becomes a physical object.
That may be one reason factory tourism feels particularly relevant in Asia right now. Much of what defines contemporary global consumer culture — electronics, cars, semiconductors, toys, robots, batteries — is either invented, engineered or manufactured there.
Seeing where something is made can increasingly feel like seeing where the world is being made.
China Has Taken the Idea Much Further
In China, the audience can be very different.
Some visitors aren’t fans.
They’re competitors.
Foreign investors, entrepreneurs and corporate executives are increasingly paying for organized trips through China’s technology hubs to visit companies involved in electric vehicles, batteries, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Some five-day programs cost as much as US$15,000.
Shanghai-based technology tour company Glopen told Reuters that inquiries increased 50 percent during 2026, primarily from European and Singaporean clients, and that it now operates more than 100 single-day company tours each month.
The itineraries can stretch through Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Hefei.
These aren’t sightseeing tours in the conventional sense.
They’re reconnaissance.
Executives who once might have studied competitors through analyst reports, trade shows and PowerPoint presentations increasingly want to stand inside the companies themselves and see how quickly products are being developed and manufactured.
The motivation is partly admiration.
It is also anxiety.
As China’s position in electric vehicles, batteries, robotics and advanced manufacturing has strengthened, foreign companies have become increasingly concerned that they don’t fully understand the speed at which Chinese industry is evolving.
So they get on an airplane. Reuters
Xiaomi Has Become a Tourist Attraction
Few examples illustrate the shift better than Xiaomi’s electric-vehicle factory in Beijing.
The highly automated operation has become sufficiently popular that visits are allocated through an online lottery.
More than 250,000 people had visited the factory since March 2024 by the time Reuters reported on the phenomenon in September 2026. Demand became intense enough that entry slots were reportedly being offered online for as much as 2,000 yuan, or roughly US$300, despite Xiaomi saying the reservations cannot be transferred. Reuters
Beijing now actively includes the Xiaomi EV factory among its technology-oriented visitor experiences.
Inside, automated systems and robotic arms perform much of the vehicle manufacturing process, while AI-enabled inspection systems monitor production. The facility isn’t simply a place where cars come out the other end.
It is a demonstration of a particular vision of manufacturing.
And that’s precisely what people have come to see.
The traditional factory tour asked:
How is this product made?
The new one increasingly asks:
How are they able to make it this quickly?
That is a very different form of tourism.
Shenzhen May Be the New Florence
The comparison sounds ridiculous until you think about what the original Grand Tour was actually for.
Beginning several centuries ago, wealthy young Europeans traveled through places including Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome because those cities contained concentrations of art, architecture, ideas and culture that supposedly couldn’t be fully understood from home.
You had to go there.
Today, an entrepreneur interested in hardware might make a similar argument about Shenzhen.
The southern Chinese city contains an extraordinary concentration of electronics suppliers, component manufacturers, engineers, prototyping companies and technology businesses.
Foreign visitors to Shenzhen increased sharply in 2025 and again in 2026. Reuters found startup founders arriving partly to source components and identify manufacturing partners, while informal networks have emerged among people travelling back and forth between Silicon Valley and Shenzhen looking for battery, display and other suppliers. Reuters
For them, Shenzhen isn’t simply another Chinese city.
It is a place where ideas can become physical products unusually quickly.
Florence once attracted people who wanted to understand Renaissance art.
Shenzhen increasingly attracts people who want to understand how a prototype becomes something millions of people can buy.
Different century.
Different masterpiece.
South Korea Shows Its Industrial Scale
South Korea has been inviting people inside its manufacturing story for years.
Hyundai’s Ulsan operation provides one of the most dramatic examples.
The complex consists of five independent vehicle factories and employs tens of thousands of people. Korea’s official tourism organization describes it as the world’s largest single automobile manufacturing plant and says it produces an average of approximately 1.52 million vehicles annually.
Visitors can reserve tours that include Hyundai’s heritage displays, part of the vehicle assembly operation and its enormous export facility.
Hyundai’s current group-tour itinerary includes time overlooking the assembly line at Plant 3 followed by a visit to the dedicated automobile shipping port. Hyundai
The scale is the attraction.
A finished Hyundai sitting in a dealership is familiar.
Watching thousands of components converge through hundreds of manufacturing processes until a finished automobile emerges creates an entirely different appreciation for the product.
Then seeing those cars gathered for shipment around the world completes the story.
Manufacturing becomes geography.
You suddenly understand why this particular city matters.
Factory Tourism Isn’t New. The Motivation Is.
There have been factory tours for generations.
Japan has a particularly long tradition of presenting manufacturing to visitors. Toyota’s Kaikan museum and its predecessor have attracted more than 17 million visitors since the original Toyota Hall opened in 1960.
Toyota’s manufacturing plant tours around its headquarters remain suspended, but in June 2026 the company opened a new Kaikan exhibition specifically explaining how a vehicle progresses from idea through development, procurement and manufacturing to the customer. Toyota Japan
Beer breweries have tours.
Whisky distilleries have tours.
Chocolate factories have tours.
People have always enjoyed watching things being made.
What’s changing is the significance of what they are watching.
An old factory could once be an attraction because it represented industrial heritage.
The new factory can be an attraction because it represents industrial advantage.
Visitors aren’t necessarily looking backward.
They want clues about what happens next.
Some of Asia’s Most Important Factories Can’t Be Toured
There is an obvious limit to this trend.
You probably aren’t going to stroll casually through the most advanced semiconductor fabrication lines.
The manufacturing processes are too sensitive, too expensive and too tightly controlled.
Taiwan offers an interesting workaround.
TSMC operates its Museum of Innovation inside Hsinchu Science Park, allowing visitors to explore the company’s role in semiconductor manufacturing and the technology ecosystem around it without opening the actual fabrication process to tourists.
Visits are free but require reservations. Guided visits are offered in Mandarin and English, with other audio-guide options available. Tsmcmoi
It isn’t the factory floor.
But it serves the same growing curiosity.
People want to understand the invisible infrastructure behind the technology they use every day.
The phone in your pocket suddenly leads to Taiwan.
The electric car leads to China or Korea.
The Gundam model on a collector’s shelf leads to Shizuoka.
Consumer objects acquire geography.
The Factory Can Tell a Country’s Story
For tourism boards, there may be a larger lesson here.
Travel promotion has traditionally focused on natural beauty, history and culture.
All remain enormously important.
But manufacturing is culture too.
South Korea’s automobile plants help explain the country’s economic transformation.
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry explains an extraordinary amount about its importance to the contemporary world.
China’s EV and robotics factories illuminate both its economic ambitions and the competitive anxiety those ambitions generate elsewhere.
Bandai’s Gundam factory combines Japanese precision manufacturing with one of the country’s great pop-cultural exports.
These aren’t separate from the identity of their destinations.
They are part of it.
And unlike a conventional museum, the best industrial attractions provide something tourists increasingly crave: access to a world normally hidden from view.
Doors open.
Machines start moving.
Robots begin assembling.
A product we know suddenly appears in an entirely different context.
The Souvenir Is Understanding
There is something refreshingly physical about all of this.
We spend much of our lives talking about technology as though it exists somewhere inside the cloud.
AI.
Automation.
Supply chains.
Semiconductors.
Robotics.
Advanced manufacturing.
They sound abstract until you stand somewhere where physical objects are actually being produced.
Then technology has noise.
Scale.
Heat.
Movement.
People.
Logistics.
The factory floor makes the abstract visible.
That may explain why executives are willing to spend thousands of dollars touring Chinese technology companies and why Gundam fans travel to Shizuoka to watch plastic model parts emerge from industrial moulds.
They are coming for very different reasons.
But they’re both looking for the same thing.
They want to see behind the finished product.
For centuries, great journeys were built around seeing the finest things civilization had already created.
Cathedrals.
Palaces.
Paintings.
Monuments.
Those journeys aren’t disappearing.
But Asia is adding another kind.
The next time someone asks what they should see in a city, the answer might not be a temple, gallery or observation deck.
It might be the assembly line.
