It’s a scenic jewel, a hamlet of hill-hugging chalets, elegant church spires and ancient inns all reflected in the deep still waters of an Alpine lake. Hallstatt’s beauty has earned it a listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site but some villagers are less happy about a more recent distinction: plans to copy their hamlet in China. After taking photos and collecting other data on the village while mingling with the tourists, a Chinese firm has started to rebuild much of Hallstatt in faraway Guandong province, a project that residents here see with mixed emotions.
Publicly, Hallstatters say they are proud that their village has caught the eye of Minmetals Land Ltd. the real estate development arm of China Minmetals Corp., China’s largest metals trader. With most of them dependent on the hundreds of thousands of tourists who overrun Hallstatt’s 900 inhabitants each year, they see the project as good for business. “We’re happy they find it beautiful enough to copy,” says souvenir store owner Ingrid Janu. Hallstatt Mayor Alexander Scheutz describes the plan as “a compliment to our village,” while hotel owner Monika Wenger thinks at least some Chinese who have seen the copycat version of Hallstatt will want to visit the original.
But in a deeply traditional part of Austria shielded for centuries from much of the rest of the world by towering mountains and steep valleys, the apparent secrecy surrounding the project has also revived suspicions of outsiders, even though Hallstatt survives only because of the millions of tourist dollars spent here every year. Although the Chinese developers say construction started in April, Scheutz and Wenger say the village knew nothing about the plan to replicate Hallstatt until early this month. They say a Chinese guest involved in the project and staying at Wenger’s hotel spilled the beans — apparently inadvertently — showing Wenger drawings and plans she should have kept to herself of the central marketplace, Wenger’s 400-year old hotel and other landmarks that were mirror images of the originals.
“I saw myself confronted with a fait accompli,” says Scheutz of his first reaction when he saw the drawings, now collected in a thick folder on his desk containing documents that he says copy much of the town, down to the individual boards of scenic wooden balconies. While he disputes local media accounts citing him as furiously vowing to prevent the Chinese project, he acknowledges being “definitely a bit stunned.” Wenger is more outspoken. She says most of the villagers she has talked to are “outraged — not about the fact but the approach.”
The Chinese developers are advertising the project as low-density, high-end residential development “surrounded by mountains with mountain and lake views,” to be built “in a European architectural style, with a commercial street built with the characteristics of an Austrian-style town.” But at the Chinese site, in the city of Huizhou about 100 miles (60 kilometers) north of the border with Hong Kong, there is little to indicate that the copycat version will ever approximate the beauty of the original.
