Walking the streets of this city in the Far East you could be forgiven for thinking you’re promenading along the pavements of Paris, that’s because Chinese developers spent £760 million creating a mini copy of the French capital.
Tianducheng, just west of Shanghai, in China, is over 6,000 miles from Paris, but that hasn’t stopped the development of having its own Eiffel Tower and a replica of fountains from the Palace of Versailles.
The bizarre Chinese homage to the City of Light was finished in 2007 with builders hoping it would attract citizens seeking a more European lifestyle.
Now more than 30,000 people live in Tianducheng, which is dominated by a miniature 354-foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower, the original in Paris measures 1,083 feet in height.
Traveller bloggers Yes Theory visited the site in 2023 after reports the area had become a ghost town after the Chinese property market slowed down in recent years.
But in a YouTube video titled “I Explored China’s Failed $1 Billion Copy of Paris (real city)” the group revealed a vibrant local population still lived in the Paris mockup.
Speaking during their visit to the city, one of the Yes Theory bloggers said the surprising thing about the fake Paris was how “beautiful” it was despite being a fraud.
Looking out from a Parisian-looking apartment block onto a square, they said: “From this way, it really does look like some neighbourhood in Paris.”
As the evening drew in as the crew filmed the location they said large crowds of people came out into the streets. They said: “There’s more life, it feels less eerie and strange and deserted.
“And it actually feels like people exist here.”
The fake Paris is in the Yuhang District near Shanghai, China, and was initially built to house around 10,000 residents. As it’s on the outskirts of several large cities, there are plenty of transport links from the city.
Unsurprisingly, it does attract some visitors who come for the quirky photo ops, as well as locals who visit to get a taste of the French city without having to splash the cash on flights to go and see the real thing.
Other iconic locations which were rebuilt in China include the canals of Venice, a replica of London’s Tower Bridge and even a copy of the Taj Mahal.
