Two of the Theme Parks in Shenzhen

Window of the World, Splendid China & the Folk Culture Villages

As mentioned in my last post, we visited 3 different parks of which one was combined. On our first day in Shenzhen, we went to the Window of the World. It is a theme park in which they replicated the world wonders, famous historical sites and natural landscapes of the world. Some of them are built at the ratio of 1:1, others of 1:5 or 1:15.

We started our journey in the Asian district which was quite big. Then we passed India and Australia and made it to Europe which buildings were very familiar to us. I liked how they rebuilt Venice’s San Marco Square. How they imagine the Netherlands was funny (see image with the many orange wind wheels). Africa was basically represented by Egypt with its pyramids and the Sphinx statue and by many wild animals.

When we came to the American continent, the sun slowly went down. It was kind of weird to see all the different sights from the US in such a small area. I especially liked how Cristo Redentor from Rio de Janeiro was now looking over New York City. You probably noticed that this city version still has the Twin Towers.

At last, we walked up the Eiffel Tour. It wasn’t as high as the real one in Paris, but we still had to walk up around 300 steps. The view was really cool. We were not only able to see over the entire park but we could also see a part of the city of Shenzhen.

Overall, it was really interesting to see the world in just a couple of hours. We walked around for over 2 hours and probably did not get to see everything but we were quite exhausted afterwards. We tried to guess where the different sites were located for real. In the European and American area we did very well but none of us has traveled much in Asia, so there our guessing was pretty bad. However, I saw some places that I definitely want to visit in the future.

Splendid China & the Folk Culture Villages

On Sunday, one of my friends and I wanted to visit the Splendid China while the rest of the group preferred a relaxing day at one of the parks.

The Splendid China is a huge miniature park of all the famous sites and landscapes of China. The Folk Culture Villages represent the 25 minor Chinese ethnic villages that were reproduced. A couple of years ago the two parks got united and now you pay 180 RMB for visiting both. It is one of the largest theme parks in the world. There is a train, even a boat and other transportation means to make it easier for visitors to visit the park. We went for the option of walking, because in this way we could do everything at our own speed and had time to take pictures.

We started at the Splendid Village, because it was the main reason for choosing this theme park. In that part of the park there are supposed to be 82 miniatures and a bunch of tiny clay figures (about 50,000) are placed on the different sites.

The Great Wall was going through half of the park which showed how impressive it really is. There were also many other sites from the Beijing area. I’m really looking forward to going there…

After 3 hours of walking around the Splendid China, we finally made it to the other the Folk Culture Villages where they have many shows and performances. We started to watch an Oriental Show and looked at some of the ethnic house. After we watched the “large horse war show" about the Mongolian culture which attracted a lot of people and is probably one of the highlights shows.

We could have spent more time at the Folk Culture Villages and learnt more about the different ethnic groups. It is just a huge park and we have already done so much walking.

In both parks they had those yellow and orange fish and I was really wondering what the story is behind them. I found out that they are koi fish and that there are many legends around. Koi fish have an ability to swim against currents and upstream. Therefore, they are often associated with good fortune, success, ambition and courage. Depending on the color of the fish, they symbolize something else. For example, a silver colored koi stands for success in business. The Chinese also used to raise them in their rice fields, because they provided fertilizer and during hard winters they survived by eating the fish. So, it is also a symbol for prosperity. In Feng Shui it is tied to the yin yang symbol which you can recognize on the picture below. The black and white tear of the yin yang are supposed to be two koi.