Down the Chinese copycat city rabbit hole | Commentaries and Features
I am very lucky to have visited Hallstatt when it rained.
The postcard-perfect Austrian town was known for its overtourism problem, but the downpour seemed to have washed the streets clean of locals and visitors alike. As I meandered through narrow streets, raincoat cinched tight around my face, hearing the rain’s tip-tap-patter against the cobblestone, I couldn’t help but feel like I was transported into Hayao Miyazaki’s “Kiki’s Delivery Service” — like the tabby cat glaring peevishly out from under the car could start speaking at any moment. That feeling never went away. There were pastel houses covered in flowers and hand-painted bleach white skulls in the Charnel House, and I allowed myself to indulge in childish adoration of a European fairytale-esque town.
For a town whose history dates back to prehistoric times, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage site felt remarkably solid. The liveliness of the town felt meta-aware, from the bitingly polite signs asking visitors to “Please keep quiet, we are living here” to the lampposts covered in graphic stickers which peeled onto my fingers when I accidentally touched them. A strange liminal space where there’s graffiti on mailboxes right next to what looked like scaled-up gingerbread houses — but never, ever on the houses themselves. Over the sound of the pouring rain, I could hear rock music from across the water.
When I came back from my hiking trip to Austria and Northern Italy, I wanted to write a cute little travel log about Hallstatt — the kind that waxes poetic about lake fog and strudel while suavely signalling I was a traveler, not a tourist. I’d known Hallstatt was featured in “Spring Waltz”, a 2006 K-drama that sent Asian tourists flooding in. But then I looked deeper into Hallstatt’s tourism generators and found that an entire wave of Chinese visitors has been showing up because a Chinese mining company built a 1:1, perfect, exact replica of the town, just outside the largest urban metropolis in the nation.
I don’t know what it’s like to walk around “Halshtatt” (哈施塔特), the private high-end residential complex in Guangdong, China, that differs from Hallstatt (哈修塔特) by only one character. But if the travel logs and news articles I’ve found hold any water, the vibes are pretty weird.
“Halshtatt” is an example of what journalist and author Bianca Bosker referred to as “duplitecture” — a phenomenon where entire townships seem to have been “airlifted from their historic and geographic foundations in Europe and the Americas, and spot-welded to Chinese cities.” It features the exact same layout of streets, pastel-coloured houses and the church spire of the original Alpine village. Developers even artificially dug a 170,0000-square-meter lake. The 6-billion-yuan ($940 million) project was conceived and funded by Minmetals Land Limited (五礦建設). Announced in 2011 and opened to the public in 2012, the village was immediately embroiled in controversy when it became apparent that UNESCO, original residents and local officials only discovered the project when construction was almost complete, due to a Chinese guest leaving behind a “bundle of blueprints” in their hotel room. Very espionage-chic.
Apparently, architects had been posing as tourists, photographing and measuring the village for months without consulting the original community. Reports generally agreed that this process felt secretive and disrespectful, or, as Mayor Alexander Scheutz politely put it, “the people are not very amused.”
To Minmetal’s credit, the operation wasn’t technically illegal. According to Hans-Jörg Kaiser of the Austrian National Committee of the International Council for the Preservation of Monuments, many of Hallstatt’s buildings are far too old for architectural copyright to apply, and everything that’s publicly viewable can be photographed and subsequently recreated. Mayor Scheutz was optimistic that the duplitecture could lead to increased tourism for Hallstatt, Austria, an instinct proven right by 2019 reports that Chinese tourists make up 40% of all visitors, so it wasn’t like the original town was being swindled either.
The architectural appropriation still doesn’t sit right with me. I mean, as resident Karin Höll said in an interview with Reuters, “Hallstatt is just unique with its culture and traditions. You cannot copy that.” At the end of the day, Minmetals was still borrowing a living cultural site, stripping away its essence for profit.
It gives the replica an uncanny valley vibe. “The whole place was empty but they tried so hard to make it seem like it was lived in and active (possibly because us foreigners were present),” one visitor shared on Reddit. This visitor noted that other floors of their hotel “were unfinished and completely empty. Nothing had been done and it was clear we were not supposed to see this.” When writer Wade Shepard of Vagabond Journey visited, he also noted that “the only people there were portrait photographers using the ornate and colorful buildings as backdrops.” In other words, the entire place felt like a movie set; all glam and no substance. “‘It’s a fake,’” a portrait photographer replied when Shepard asked him what he thought of the place. “‘There are no people, there is no culture. It’s just a fake.’”
Hallstatt isn’t a one-off case either. In Shanghai, Thames Town in Songjiang is modelled after a traditional English town with Victorian-style houses and red phone boxes). In Holland Town in Gaoqiao, one could explore canals, windmills and copies of Amsterdam landmarks. There’s the former farmland in Hangzhou that’s now Tianducheng, which features a slightly smaller Eiffel Tower, a recreation of Jardin du Luxembourg’s Fontaine de l’Observatoire and Parisian-style streetscapes. This was intended to be a luxury housing estate, yet the forecasted 10,000 residents for which the city had developed did not materialize. Just like Hallstatt, it merely drew curious onlookers and couples using the Parisian landscape as a backdrop for their wedding photos.
After 2 years, People’s Daily Online reported that “Halshtatt” had only recovered 400 million yuan out of the 6 billion invested. And despite 60% of the units being sold and the neighbourhood being located right next to a bustling commercial district, the villa area built around the mountain was sparsely populated. People’s Daily reporters found that at 9 p.m., only one villa had its lights on, a stark contrast to the 337 units sold. It was, in other words, a ghost town. Even commercial shops weren’t exempt — only a handful were open despite many tourists, and most were self-operated. The majority of shops had fake doors, and there was only one small convenience store available. There was no grocery store — the closest are a 10-minute drive away, in the Jiangbei District and Boluo County, along a dirt road which, “if the wheels turn even slightly fast, will kick up a trail of dust.” Huang Bolin, president of Huade Consulting, commented to the People’s Daily that “‘A project of 1 million square meters should at least have a community store of two or three thousand square meters.’”
While some of these ghost towns have somewhat recovered — Tianducheng, for example, Newsweek reported, has more or less become a “normal place where people live” — the status of “Halshtatt” itself is unclear. A recent YouTube video from creator “The Map” — a video that has, to me, an eerily AI-generated vibe — claims it has a permanent population over 10,000 and functions with schools, hospitals and tourism and wedding-photo traffic.
More than a decade later, in a world dominated by artificial intelligence, I can’t help but feel these simulacrums were a precursor for things to come. What does it mean that we live in a world where a culture can be airlifted and commodified into a gated luxury community? Where billions of dollars can be poured into villas sold at prices double the average in the county, targeting the new rich, while just a half-hour away is Huizhou, a manufacturing hub with millions of workers facing housing and affordability insecurity? While that replication is approached with wry amusement by English travel blogs, with visiting instructions for anyone curious enough to go, criticism ends at easy jabs that such cities are “Made in China” — which, I guess, isn’t really that far off base. The exterior shell of an object has been copied to perfection; its “undefinable energy that feeds the imagination and stimulates the spirit”, as Shepard put it, is hollowed out as a consequence. Except a luxury bag or iPhone doesn’t really have a soul in the same way, so such flippant reactions fill me with unease. Our response to this flattening is simply amusement. How can this not make you profoundly, sickeningly sad?
In other words, I don’t think our current culture’s obsession with copies-that-are-close-enough-to-the-real-thing-that-they’re-almost-the-same and thoughts-that-are-close-enough-to-human-thoughts-that-there’s-basically-no-difference and videos-that-are-so-real-they’re-basically-the-real-person is intrinsically tied to the current moment and AI. We’ve been letting large corporations get away with spiritually AI soul-stripping-for-profit for a long time, which I recognize is pretty bleak.
I’m thinking about that cat glaring out from under the car. If I had come a few hours earlier, or if the rain hadn’t come, or if I had moved a bit more to the right — the cat probably wouldn’t have been there, or I wouldn’t have been there, or the streets would have been too crowded for me to see the cat at all. I’ve never been to Guangdong. I don’t know what it’s like to stand in the rain there. The cats probably don’t glare in the same way, though. And the rain probably smells different; different water, different dirt. By which I mean — in other words — no, I don’t think it’s “almost the same” at all. Not even close.