One could easily confuse with Paris the Tianducheng district of the Chinese city of Hangzhou, which is preparing to welcome about 12,000 athletes to the Asian Games on Saturday. This is a key milestone for many top athletes ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
To discover
- Five things to know about ticketing for the 2024 Olympics
Built in the 2000s, this residential area 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 at a third of the original.
Apartment buildings decorated with wrought iron balconies and mansard roofs in the Parisian style flank a boulevard where delivery tricycles pass in front of a shop.
Pensioners stop to admire the landscape under a grey sky, 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 unoccupied shops and uninhabited apartments before Hangzhou's booming tech industry drew enthusiastic shoppers to its leafy avenues.
Hangzhou's Eiffel Tower, built one-third of the original, is one of many replicas of Western architecture that dot the country where developers once looked to Europe and North America for inspiration. 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.
These are relics of a bygone era, with China's communist leaders banning foreign-inspired structures in recent years.
