Pop quiz: what do you do if you're Chinese and you want to
see a picturesque Austrian village? Go to Austria? Ha.
China-based developer
China Minmetals Ltd. has a better idea: go to that famous font of German
tradition, Guangdong Province. Der
Spiegel reports:
An idyllic
Austrian village has apparently impressed Chinese architects so much that they
have decided to copy it in their own country. But the townspeople living
in the UNESCO World Heritage site are unhappy about the plans.
Residents of the Austrian mountain town
of Hallstatt, population 800, are scandalized. A Chinese firm has plans to
replicate the village -- including its famous lake -- in the southern Chinese
province of Guangdong, Austrian media reported this week.
The construction of Hallstatt comes at a time when outbound
Chinese tourism is skyrocketing, reshaping the landscape of global tourism. Tourism
didn't become legal in China until 1978,
after Mao's death. Nonetheless, the World Tourism Organization estimates that
the total number of Chinese tourists traveling internationally could hit 130
million by 2020. A recent surge in Chinese tourists traveling to Europe has carved out a sort
of Chinese "Grand
Tour" with non-traditional destinations like Luxembourg and Metzingen,
home of German suitmaker Hugo Boss. Still, Chinese citizens continue to travel
plenty within their own country, making 2.1 billion domestic trips in 2010
alone.
China Minmetals' ploy is only the latest instance of Chinese
architects recreating European cities and towns at home. Shanghai has
mini-replicas of Barcelona and Venice, while Chengdu has its own British Town
modeled on Dorchester, a market town near the south coast of England. Guess
those 40 Chinese UNESCO World
Heritage sites (including the Kaiping
villages in Guangdong, 120 miles from the proposed site for the Austrian
transplants) just won't cut it.
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