The plan to build a copy of Angkor Wat in
India caused shock and dismay. Why asks David Robson, when replica buildings
are such a familiar phenomenon?
Buildings
at the Wild West-themed Jackson Hole development
Thanks to the Beijing Resplendency Great
Exploit Real Estate Company Ltd, second-homes from China’s capital need only
drive two hours north from the city and they’re in the American Wild West. The
850 houses in Jackson Hole, Hebei Province, are built from plans – loosely
based on the Jackson Hole in Wyoming – drawn up by a US architect and tricked
out with antler chandeliers, wagon wheels, Navajo rugs and so forth supplied by
Allison Smith, a designer from Portland, Oregon.
the
Great Wall in China
“I was dropped off in an undeveloped area
150 miles outsides the Great Wall and simply told, “Please design vacation
homes,” says Smith. She offered a number of options, including versions of
Martha’s Vineyard and Vail. But the developer with the resplendent name fell in
love with cowboy country. And so did its customers.
An
English village in the Shanghai
For a very different sensation, a short
ride out of Shanghai takes you to an English town, or at least a strange
version thereof: gabled Edwardian houses with privet hedges, a mock-Tudor pub
selling real ale, a village green, a chippy and a church modeled on Bristol’s
St Mary Redcliffe. This is Thames Town. Nearby are other towns intended to
replicate Italy, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany – picturesque
locations for wedding photographs and sightseeing, but also places where quite
well-to-do Chinese people choose to live.
One way to experience wonderful things is
to travel; another is to try them at home. When Blackpool’s mayor, John
Bickerstaffe, visited Paris for the Exposition Universelle in 1889, he was
impressed by the new Eiffel Tower. “We should have one of those,” he thought,
and within five years Blackpool did; the tower has been a major attraction ever
since. It is not an exact copy, being half the height of the original and
having a building at the bottom so its feet don’t touch the ground. But there
are plenty of more faithful ersatz Eiffel Towers around the world. The Paris
Las Vegas hotel has a half-height one and a two-thirds-size Arc de Triomphe.
It’s a small world in Vegas: just along the strip is the Venetian hotel and
casino, with palazzo-lined canals and gondolas.
a
copy of the Eiffel Tower in China
Near the city of Hangzhou in China’s
Zhejiang Province there’s a more expansive version of Paris than the one in
Vegas: as well as the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe (of course) it has the
Champ de Mars and Parisian-style buildings to house 100,000 people. And as a
bonus you also get the great fountain from Versailles.
A
copy of Taj Mahal in China
About 15km from Dhaka, Bangladesh’s
capital, a wealthy local film-maker has built a full-size replica of the Taj
Mahal. He has done it, he says, so that people too poor to travel to Agra to
see the world’s most beautiful building will not be denied its delights. It has
taken five years to build, a quarter of the time required for the 17th-century
original, and it has caused annoyance in India. An Indian project to create a
replica of Cambodia’s great Hindu shirne Angkor Wat on the banks of the Ganges
has caused fury. A Cambodian government spokesman said that copying his
country’s most famous building was “a shameful act”. Oddly, a newly built
replica of Stonehenge in Western Australia has caused hardly a ripple in
Wiltshire.
copy of the famous Greek Parthenon in China
You’ve never been to Athens, never seen the
Parthenon? People from Tennessee don’t have to go all that way: there’s a
full-size replica of the temple in a park in Nashville. Built is 1897 of
plaster, wood and brick as a temporary structure for the Tennessee Centennial
Exposition, it was rebuilt in concrete three decades later. Unlike the Athens
Parthenon, it has a 42ft-tall statue of Athena at its centre. Made in 1990, it
is based on scholarly studies of the original, which was lost in the fifth
century. If Greeks want to see Athena (admittedly made of gypsum and fibre
glass under her gold leaf), they can always find her in the home of country-and-western
music.
The marbles that decorated the Parthenon’s
pediments are reproduced in plaster in Nashville. Some of the originals are in
the Acropolis Museum in Athens; but many more, of course, are in the British
Museum. Thanks to Lord Elgin, the British did not have to copy the marbles; he
liked the look of them so much he had them brought back to England.
If China’s imitation English, French and
Wild West towns are the products of the country’s new-found wealth seeking
novelty, the old money of old England was often equally dissatisfied with that
was on offer at home and sought to capture the magic of abroad by stealing or
reproducing it. Many of Britain’s great houses dating from the 17th
and 18th centuries are copies of the work of Andrea Palladio, the 16th-century
Venetian architect, himself an interpreter of Greek and Roman classicism.
The razzmatazz of Las Vegas and the
wholesale mimicry of China’s Thames Town may seem far removed from the most
refined of Britain’s great Palladian houses, but they have this in common: they
offer you the flavor of another place, and perhaps another time, without the
need to go to the country to which they belong. It’s like travelling without
travelling, the most environmentally friendly form of tourism.
