Hanno's blog

It made the news last year that in China, a copy of the austrian historic town Hallstatt was built. Not far from Guangzhou, and as I was there anyway on my way to Hongkong, I thought that's interesting and I'd pay it a visit.

It was a bit tricky to get there. I found only limited information online. The place is near Luoyang, which is part of an area called Boluo, near the town Huizhou. Getting to Huizhou was mostly hassle-free, there are many trains every day from Guangzhou and it takes about two hours. How to come to Luoyang/Boluo is another story. I had two bus numbers I found in some Internet forums, but I couldn't find them at the train station. So either the information was wrong or the buses with that numbers are departing from another place in Huizhou. I also had some GPS coordinates I found online of the copycat Hallstatt, but it turned out later that they were not very accurate.

Checking the map, the place I wanted to visit was only about 10 kilometers away, so I took a taxi. About 15 minutes later and 100 Yuan poorer I arrived in Luoyang. It was already late in the evening, so I decided to take one of the few hotels there. The next day, equipped with the GPS coordinates I went to the austrian village in China. Starting from Luoyang, there's a street with a stadium that's mostly still in construction. I found out that the coordinates I had were about two kilometers off. But after asking some workers, I finally arrived. (correct coordinates for the entrance are lat 23.18112, lon 114.32656, I'll also add something to Openstreetmap)

What is interesting to know is that this place isn't primarily a tourist destination. It's a housing development, people are supposed to live here. However, I think nobody lives here yet, because except for the town's center, everything is still in construction. There are a number of similar projects in China. Tianducheng in eastern China, which rebuilts parts of Paris, has gotten quite a lot of media attention lately as an example for the Chinese housing bubble. Almost nobody lives there and it's mostly a ghost town. As the chinese Hallstatt isn't yet ready to house anyone, the future will tell if it'll fall to the same fate.

There were a number of things that made this place weird. The most obvious thing: You usually don't see tropical plants in an austrian town. I have no idea why they had a (fake/nonworking) red, british-style phone booth. Maybe for a chinese Britain isn't that far from Austria after all. Although this place isn't primarily meant as a tourist destination, it certainly attracts a lot of them. It was quite crowded. I haven't seen anyone who looked like being from Austria though.

After staying here for a while and having a coffee, I went back to Luoyang. There is a bus station in front of the entrance (line 6, but I don't know where it's heading), but no bus came for a while, so I walked back. Grabbing my luggage from my Hotel, I wanted to take a taxi again, but luckily, when I arrived at the main street a bus with Huizhou written on it just stopped in front of me (to be precies, it had 惠州 written on it, but I manage to recognize chinese characters well enough to remember the towns where I've been lately). So my way back was much cheaper and the bus - without a line number - brought me directly to the train station where I headed back to Guangzhou.

I'd like to finish with a quick comment. When reading western news commenting about this case and others, they're often quick in condemning this kind of "copycat" culture. I think one needs to be careful with that. The importance of the "original" is something that is deeply rooted in cultural norms and traditions. Sticking to the original is something that's probably more important in European cultures than in China. But I don't think either of them is right or wrong, it's just a different approach to culture. After all, it doesn't hurt anybody if someone is rebuilding Austrian villages in China. Also, there is almost certainly no legal issue at stake here. While it may be debatable if a town's layout can be covered by copyright, Hallstatt is a historic city. So if there is any copyright on it, it's already expired.

Pictures from Luoyang
Pictures from Chinese Hallstatt

Some Links:
Blog entry about Hallstatt / China on thechinachronicle.com
Blog entry about Hallstatt / China on liongrass.hk

While going on to the south of China, we had a short stop in Guangzhou (广州). It is the third largest city in the country and the center of the cantonese part of China. At this time of the year, the climate in Guangzhou is very extreme, which we suddenly experienced when we left the train: Very hot and very humid.

Our original plan was to take the ferry to Haikou (海口) on Hainan (海南) island, but that failed because we were unable to find the ferry. First a taxi driver told us that the ferry doesn't exist at all. We then tried to find it at Huangpu port like it's statet on various internet pages, but there was no ferry and nobody could tell us anything useful about it. The information about Huangpu port you can find online (both place and days/times) is probably outdated. Although we didn't take the ferry at the end, if you find this information helpful to my best knowledge this should be correct (information from Haikou port and tourist information):
Haikou (海口) Xiuying (秀英港) port to Guangzhou Shazaidao port - starting from 2nd of every month every three days, 14:00
Guangzhou Shazaidao port to Haikou (海口) Xiuying (秀英港) port - starting from 3rd of every month every three days, 16:00
Price per person: ¥ 130 / ¥ 180 / ¥ 220 / ¥ 260 / ¥ 300 / ¥ 450 (room with more than 16 / 8-16 / 8 / 4 / 2 / 2 beds). Trip takes approximately 19 hours.

We also didn't take the ferry for our way back, as I already wrote, a typhoon stopped us from doing so.

On our unplanned one day stop in Guangzhou, we visited the Yuexi park (越秀公园). It is the largest urban park in China and it was a nice opportunity to see the tropical plant life in that area.

Guangzhou pictures (not many)
Guangzhou Yuexi park pictures

Due to current events, I'm abandoning the chronological order of my trip reports. You have probably read about the floods currently in China.

We are currently in Haikou on Hainan Island in the south of China. Our plan was to take the ferry to Guangzhou today but all ferry services are cancelled due to the Typhoon Haima. You can follow its way on this japanese webpage.

So we are trapped and our Hotel will have us as guests some days more.

Sidenote: I had hoped to get informed about such dangers by the travelling information from the foreign ministry of Germany. But it doesn't even mention the Typhoon and Flood at all. The UK information was a bit more helpful.

Update: We've long left the typhoon area and nothing happened to us, I just didn't have the time to complete further blog entries.