"Both French and Chinese like ending a business meeting around good food and drink." - An answer to a question on 'Quora' on the similarities of France and China read. Yes, the two countries have strong similarities when it comes to food and cuisine. But looks like the similarities are spreading to architecture as well.
In another ambitious real estate attempt, China has created a mini Paris, complete with Romanesque buildings, fountains, statuettes and a faux Eiffel tower too! However, just like its other urban developments that remain starkly empty, this beautiful Parisian replica also remains hardly inhabited.
According to Curbed, Tianducheng, a small town near Hangzhou, located in the Zhejiang Province just on the outskirts of Shanghai, captures the essence of Paris beautifully, but has failed to fill it up with the hordes of people it expected to have lured in.
However, Tianducheng has its own Chinese touch. Theatlanticcities.com calls the town a place where "where China's aspirations and traditions awkwardly collide". The town has a replica of a fountain from the Luxembourg Gardens in the main square but also has a "driver in a top hat and tails [who] drives a horse and buggy to a yellow church at the top of a hill, where a Chinese 'priest' in black robes and white clerical collar stages Western wedding ceremonies at an altar hung with a cross."
The "west meets east" combination blurs lines between rural and urban living too. The mock Eiffel Tower is about 108 meters high and surrounded by farms where farmers have small wood and straw homes and have erected their own wooden poles and suspended lines to dry clothes!
The construction started in 2007. The town can accommodate a population of 10,000 people. It also has a supermarket and all other amenities any local residential area would have. According to the Economic Times, this place was built to attract wealthy Chinese people because French wines, handbags and holidays have been a status symbol among them. However, the town has not been able to do much.
Tour Tianducheng in a video below:
This particular civilization joins the other urban developments that lie deserted. Many projects in China have replicated other European cities to make the country a mini continent on its own. Much of China's GDP is invested in infrastructure and urban development. Every two months of the past decade, the country has built infrastructure equivalent to the size of Rome. While some experts are cynical about what will happen to these developments, other say that the "abandonment" is just a phase and it shall pass only to grow into "the greatest urbanization story, the world has ever seen."
