The Tianducheng district of the Chinese city of Hangzhou, which is preparing to welcome around 12,000 athletes to the Asian Games on Saturday, could easily be confused with Paris. This is a key step for many top athletes ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Built in the 2000s, this residential district is a relic testifying to the country’s enthusiasm for everything foreign at the beginning of the century. The Eiffel Tower in Hangzhou was nevertheless built a third of the original.
Housing buildings decorated with wrought iron balconies and attached roofs in the Parisian way flank a boulevard where delivery tricycles pass in front of a shop.
Retirees stop to admire the landscape under gray skies, while statues of horses stand from a fountain that could have emerged from the Luxembourg Gardens.
Once touted as a luxury community and venue for French cultural festivals, the Tianducheng district lived for years with vacant stores and uninhabited apartments before Hangzhou’s booming tech industry attracted eager buyers in its green avenues.
Hangzhou’s Eiffel Tower, built a third of the original, is one of many replicas of Western architecture dotting the country where developers once looked to Europe and North America for construction. inspire. It also has a British-inspired Thames Town in Shanghai and a subtropical Interlaken in the tech hub of Shenzhen.
And in Jujun in 2001, on the outskirts of Beijing, McMansions with parched lawns brought a slice of Southern California to the Chinese capital.
They are relics of a bygone era, with China’s communist leaders banning foreign-inspired structures in recent years.