As you walk down the cobblestoned streets to the village green, you pass Edwardian town homes surrounded by neat privet hedges, and white stucco Victorian terraces nearer to the high street. Here's a mock-Tudor pub, there's a fish-and-chip shop. The iconic red phone boxes of the British Isles stand next to quaint corner shops. It's hard to believe that the whole thing is just 40 minutes from downtown Shanghai. Wait, what?
Shanghai tries to get its residents to see the world.
In early 2001, the Shanghai Planning Commission launched a massive experiment. In the hopes of luring half a million people off the crowded streets of the world's largest city and gentrifying its unfashionable outskirts, nine new suburban communities were planned. To sweeten the deal of the "One City, Nine Towns" plan, the new 'burbs were each designed to resemble the cities of some Western nation. Songjiang District, southwest of Shanghai, was going to become "Thames Town."
Songjiang was soon as English as double-decker buses and warm beer.
Two billion yuan (about $330 million) was spent over three years to create Merrie Olde England from scratch out of the rice paddies. No expense was spared: Actual lampposts were imported from Britain. A scale replica of Christ Church, a picturesque Gothic parish church in Bristol, was built on the town square. "Visitors will soon be unable to tell where Europe ends and China begins," announced the Shanghai Planning Commission, implausibly.
All the comforts of Saskatchewan, without ever leaving Shanghai.
As Songjiang's "Little Britain" took shape, eight other Epcot-style towns were on the drawing board. Anting would become an efficient, biergarten-filled German suburb designed by no less than Albert Speer! (No, not that guy. His son, who runs an architecture firm in Frankfurt.) Cervantes-style windmills and Spanish tile roofs rose over Fengcheng. Gaoquiao dug the canals of the Netherlands. Feng Jing, the most remote suburb, apparently drew the short straw: It was set aside for Chinese citizens excited to live in "Canadian Maple Town."
China's little slice of Britain is bloody deserted.
Houses sold quickly in Thames Town, but the middle class didn't come as planned. A real estate bubble in China priced the homes well out of the reach of most Shanghai residents, and most were instead bought as investments or second homes by wealthy Chinese. In fact, most of the international "Nine Towns" were never completed. In Songjiang District's cozy English village, replica storefronts and pubs have cheerily authentic signage, but nearly all sit empty. Thames Town is a ghost town.
Explore the world's oddities every week with Ken Jennings, and check out his book Maphead for more geography trivia.
