By:- Mike Rampton
- Some places in China have a really un-Chinese feeling to them, like they’ve been transported from elsewhere in the world. Dropped in the middle of what is unmistakably China, you might find a replica Leaning Tower of Pisa or run into the kind of guard usually found outside Buckingham Palace.
There’s a bit of a trend in China for recreating overseas places. Sometimes it’s just one building — leading to occasional lawsuits about “architectural piracy” — and sometimes it’s a deliberately orchestrated bid to turn one place into quite another. The phenomenon has been given a name, “duplitecture,” coined by Bianca Bosker in her book Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China. (She also coined the term “simulacrascapes,” which is both hard to say and looks like it has the word “crap” in it, even though it doesn’t.)