We know that China is pretty good with knockoffs, but this time they have gone ahead and recreated a village in Austria that has been marked out as part of World Heritage by UNESCO. And that is indeed something special, as it is not very often that we get replicas of an entire village and this is even an achievement for the Chinese, who seem to be very adept at taking ideas from the rest of the world and then just mass producing them on a large scale for cheaper costs.

So, when a Chinese mining tycoon decided that he wanted his own version of Hallstatt, all he had to do was to ask the skilled Chinese workers to just imitate the real village and spend $940 million to ensure that they brought the beautiful town across continents. The buildings are designed in the exact same fashion as those in the small town, which are all geared up for some heavy snow.

Supported by Minmetals Land Inc, the replica village even saw some of the denizens of the real Hellstatt at the opening and while they did successfully manage to recreate the village, obviously the pictures backdrop, the stunning Austrian Alps and the snow-clad winters are still missing … Some things you just cannot simply imitate!

And now let’s see the original

HallStatt in all its beauty

(Original Hallstatt images courtesy of fanpop, hallstattaustria, wiki, portal-start, shortfinal)