Archaeology of Replicas

The Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, the spire of Notre-Dame de Paris, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan—yesterday’s grandeur has faded into the annals of history. Yet, we still have the World Park.

Built in the 1990s in Beijing, the World Park has stood for over three decades. Looking back, its miniature replicas, once criticized as crude imitations, have unexpectedly become preservers of a bygone era in the relentless march of time. The Twin Towers of Manhattan were reduced to rubble in the 9/11 attacks; the central spire of Notre Dame succumbed to fire; and the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, that ancient wonder, was lost to the sands of time centuries before its replica rose in the southern suburbs of Beijing.

The replicas were initially created to mimic their originals faithfully. Yet, the destruction of the originals has reversed the dynamic, imbuing these unscathed copies with a peculiar significance. They now stand as inverted relics—artifacts whose authenticity is uncertain, memorials whose emotion seems ambivalent, and classics whose survival is marked by both irony and serendipity.