Photo of the Day: It’s a Small World

As China “rails at [the recent] theme park boom“, with officials criticizing what they see as “unclear concepts, blind construction, imitations and plagiarism, low-standard duplication and other issues” in the industry, our photo theme this week is Theme Park Dream — a look at some of the more notable theme parks to have cropped up in the country in recent years.

It’s tempting to think that Chuzhou’s Great Wall Park was exactly the kind of place authorities had in mind when they issued their recent edict. The site in Anhui province made headlines around the world when photos started to spread of its combination of fake Great Sphinx, knock-off Transformers, and imitation Louvre pyramid among other apparently randomly juxtaposed landmarks and fictional characters.

The area — which originally seemed to be being touted as a theme park — has since been rebranded as a “film base”, which makes its “fake” monuments a little more palatable. It also seems to have spared Anhui’s Great Sphinx from the same fate as that in Hebei province which was beheaded in 2016 following an official complaint to UNESCO from the government of Egypt.