Forget Louis Vuitton knockoffs: China has been churning out counterfeits of the West’s greatest architectural hits, from UNESCO heritage zones and Le Corbusier icons to Manhattan skyscrapers and Orange County gated communities.
My book Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China examines China’s “duplitecture” movement—the construction of monumentally themed communities that replicate the West’s most iconic locales. I take a look inside the walls of these faux-Versailles homes and Paris knockoffs to explore why China copies and what these copycat developments reveal about the new Chinese Dream.
Photo by Bianca Bosker
Bianca Bosker
In the suburbs of Hangzhou, the greatest hits of Parisian architecture have been recreated in a sprawling residential development, Tianducheng, complete with churches, castles and carriage rides. A 108-meter replica of the Eiffel Tower was built in Tianducheng’s Champs Elysées Square, which stands not far from a replica of an amphitheater modeled after the arena of Nîmes and parterre gardens of the type that decorate the grounds of the Palace of Versailles.
Tianducheng, which brands itself the “Oriental Paris,” has recreated not only France’s architecture, but aspects of French culture, as well. Tianducheng hosts a “French culture week” that offers extensive, detailed instructions on French food, music, art, and even cars, from how to chew caviar properly to the difference between a bistro and brasserie.
Photo: Bianca Bosker (L), Sean MacEntee via Flickr (R)
Bianca Bosker (L), Sean MacEntee via Flickr (R)
There is a major disconnect between Western architectural critics’ dismissive stance toward China’s duplitecture projects—which they deem backward, inauthentic, kitschy and even “terrifying”—and the burgeoning demand for these themed towns among Chinese homeowners, who are willing to spend their life’s savings to live in a Tudor home or in fake Venice. (Hangzhou’s Venice Water Town is pictured here next to a view of Italy’s canal city.)
Discarding their own legacy as a source of prestige, many Chinese have turned to the buildings of the West, seen as exemplary of wealth, sophistication, and fine living. One resident in Shanghai’s Blue Cambridge development boasts that her house represents “wealth, advancement and beauty,” thanks to its “better . . . more high-class” Western style. A homeowner in Shenzhen quipped that her home in California-style Galaxy Dante demonstrates “we have a social identity at the upper level.”
Photo: Bianca Bosker (L), Rhys Asplundh via Flickr (R)
The developers behind China’s copycat communities go to stunning lengths to ensure their copies evoke the character of the western original, from emulating European urban planning principles, to naming streets after western landmarks.
No detail is too small to overlook: In Shanghai’s Thames Town, shown here, security guards dressed like Buckingham palace guards patrol cobblestone streets with names like “Chelsea Lane,” which are lined with pubs, cafes and even statues of British greats like Winston Churchill.
Thames Town’s crown jewel is a Gothic cathedral modeled on the Christ Church in Bristol, England, both pictured. Though only a small percentage of China’s populace is Christian, churches are a staple of the nation’s themed towns, and attract a flood of Chinese couples who pose for wedding portraits against the churches. Thames Town’s “Christ Church” attracts so many newlyweds that the town set up a prop table adorned with a fake wedding cake, bottle of champagne, and basket of baguettes that photographers use to stage scenes of marital bliss.
Photo: Bianca Bosker (L), Robert Cutts via Flickr (R)
Bianca Bosker (L), Robert Cutts via Flickr (R)
Chinese developers have recreated European landmarks that are centuries old, and yet the Piazza San Marco in Venice Water Town is shiny, pristine and spotless, lacking all the patina of age we’re used to seeing in Venice’s original. The Western replicas are also too old: modern architecture might exist in the European city being replicated, but it doesn’t square with China’s concept of what Paris or Amsterdam should look like. Contemporary architecture gets neatly excised so as not to spoil the Gothic palaces, cathedrals and historic homes.
From photos alone, it can be difficult to appreciate the sheer size of these enormous replicas. Miniature theme parks these developments are not: While some European-themed developments have tried to make the copy more authentic by duplicating the density and scale of an Austrian hamlet or Dutch town, others supersize quaint European buildings. Hangzhou’s Venice Water Town looks like Venice, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it, in part because the townhouses are so much larger and imposing than those lining the canals in Italy.
Photo: Bianca Bosker (L), Joseph Hunkins via Flickr (R)
Bianca Bosker (L), Joseph Hunkins via Flickr (R)
Dutch colonial style townhouses, which offer commercial space on the ground floors, line a main street in Shanghai’s Holland Village, which features planters containing plastic tulips and even faux windmills.
Though Holland Village went so far as to recreate the layout and density of a town in Amersfoort (a city in the Netherlands), by and large, as long as a development is recognizably western, it works. A real estate agent at the San Carlos development in Shanghai, for example, boasted that the community’s yellow-and-purple townhouses had been designed by a French architect working in France, and thus represented the very essence of Baroque French design. A few minutes later, another sales person assured me that San Carlos was the “pinnacle of the Italian style.”
Bianca Bosker (L)
A recent visit to the “Scandinavia of Shanghai,” Luodian Town, revealed the Nordic-themed development was still an empty ghost town, even long after construction had been completed. The development, like a host of other copycat communities, was spearheaded and bankrolled by government officials and its lackluster success reveals how China’s “build it and they will come” approach is being tested in the nation’s more capitalist market economy.
Luodian Town, for example, suffers from having been built in an out-of-the-way locale with poor public transportation infrastructure, and as a result has had trouble attracting businesses and residents. Yet even in ghost towns that are nearly devoid of actual residents, it’s not unusual to find that every unit has been sold: many homes have been snapped up by speculators who are betting that demand for the limited number of single-family homes will skyrocket soon.
Yet Luodian Town’s success has been further hindered by the layout and orientation of its homes: The foreign architects who designed the development failed to incorporate principles of fengshui in many of the residences, which has been a turnoff for Chinese homebuyers seeking western living with Chinese characteristics.
Bianca Bosker (L)
