A closer look
Tianducheng is a luxury real estate development in China that was built as an exact, albeit scaled-down, replica of Paris, complete with a three-hundred-foot Eiffel Tower and Haussmann-style architecture. Developers poured massive amounts of money into creating this romantic European clone to attract wealthy residents, but for years it sat mostly empty as a deeply unsettling ghost town. Nothing screams luxury quite like walking past a fake French avenue surrounded by sprawling Chinese farmland while absolutely no one is around. Eventually, it gained a modest population, mostly because the rent is incredibly cheap compared to actual Paris, and you do not have to deal with disgruntled waiters. It is the ultimate testament to the bizarre architectural phenomenon of copy-pasting an entire cultural heritage just because you ran out of original urban planning ideas
