Building Europe in China

Why are real estate developers obsessed with overseas styles?

You live in a community called Seine Mansion, buy your clothes and groceries at Florentia Town, and have dinner at The Capital Venice - this is a regular day in the life for residents of Tianjin, China.

For a country definitely located on a different continent, it is amazing how frequently you run into European place names in China, especially around luxury housing communities and shopping centers.

Let's face it: Chinese developers love to slap names that sound "European" onto prime real estate. The quotation marks are needed because when the developers' imagination runs wild, the place names end up with no regard for reality. When looking for an apartment in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, you may find yourself choosing between Downton Abbey, Europa Town, Oriental Milan and Roman Sicily. The name doesn't even have to refer to a place, as long as it's vaguely associated with the West; Cappuccino and Mocha are also developments in Xi'an.

By randomly sampling 240 residential communities (居民区 jūmínqū) in 12 Chinese cities, researchers found that of all the estates with Western-inspired names, 24.5 percent had a French connection, making France the most popular country among Chinese estate-namers. This was about 6 percent ahead of the United States, which ranked second. Germany, Italy, and Austria were also favorites.

While most developers are content with mere suggestions of the West in their estate names, leaving the rest to resemble any regular Chinese community, some go a step further to create the illusion that the property owners are actually living abroad. In Shanghai, there is a Thames Town, built to resemble a quaint British neighborhood, complete with red-brick cottages and chimneys, a chapel, a covered bridge and shuttle buses that resemble steam trains. In Jiangyan, Jiangsu province, a small replica of the Arc de Triomphe stands in front of a community called Oriental Paris City. Hangzhou, displaying a similar zest for Parisian landmarks, has its own Eiffel Tower and a supposed reconstruction of the Champs Elysees at the foot of it, although right now the tower is still rising out of vast vegetable fields.

Home decor (家庭装修 jiātíng zhuāngxiū) isn't exempt from this pursuit of all things Western.

"The European-style Chinese home is usually pursued by the newly rich, because it looks expensive and luxurious," Zhang Yi, a Beijing interior designer says. "Our more cultured clientele, or those who are really rich, prefer something modern and simple."

In many cases, so-called "European" home decor is an affront to good proportion and planning, a space crammed with multilayered satin curtains, giant chandeliers dangling in front of your nose, plants resting atop Roman pillars and bronze angels frolicking in between. The typical Chinese apartment does not provide enough room for classical European decor, to say nothing of most Chinese furniture-makers' knowledge of European aesthetic elements and how to tastefully combine them.

So where does this imagined Europe come from? Why do Chinese developers, and a considerable number of home buyers, consider European styles the epitome of class?

From 1912 to 1949, it was common for students and intellectuals to receive their education in the West - and Qian Zhongshu's novel, Fortress Besieged (围城 wéichéng), spares no effort satirizing the intellectual pretensions of these individuals. However, for a long time in China's modern history most Chinese people had no access to the real Europe. Both poverty and policy made traveling abroad unfeasible, and people consequently had extremely limited resources for understanding Europe.

That's why, when the 1980s and 1990s arrived, Chinese people were eyeing the Western world with unprecedented curiosity and open-mindedness. Young people devoured Western literature and philosophy. Even the abstruse works of Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger sold out once they were translated. In pop culture, a remote, vague Europe was gradually being constructed out of the then extremely popular novels of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Gustave Flaubert, and films like El Destino de Sissi (茜茜公主 xīxī gōngzhǔ) and Roman Holiday (罗马假日 luómǎ jiàrì). The Europe that appeared in the media was populated by castles, bucolic landscapes, and, in particular, the aristocratic lifestyle of its upper classes. These same adolescents who were enthralled by this romantic vision of Europe would grow up to become China's first generation of real estate developers, who made their fortunes in the early 2000s.

If we go back 100 years, China was not always so enthralled by an imagined Europe, though Western architecture has been imported into China since the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). It was integrated into Chinese architecture in subtle and creative ways and Chinese architecture made some successful efforts to adapt to the modern era and develop its own original style.

In the 1920s, when Chinese architecture first began to modernize, the earliest pioneers in this field were mostly Westerners. One of the first architects who contributed to the integration of traditional Chinese and Western architecture was Henry Murphy, who designed many landmark buildings at Peking University, Tsinghua University, Nanking University and Xiamen University. Murphy was a powerful advocate for updating traditional Chinese architecture and was hired to renovate the then-capital city of Nanjing. Even today, the campuses he built are hailed as the most beautiful in China, where Western architectural techniques and modern utility are fused with Chinese aestheticism.

In the 1950s, with the founding of New China, the well-known Chinese architect Liang Sicheng

(梁思成)was another advocate of modernizing traditional Chinese architecture. Liang's designs advocated a balanced combination of Western and traditional Chinese styles.

Chinese architecture (建筑 jiànzhù) today seems to go to two extremes (极端 jí duān): It either copies classical European architecture - mostly clumsily but occasionally with stunning accuracy - or it imitates traditional Chinese palaces and imperial gardens.

It's in this void of identity that European names and the crazy copycatting of European landmarks (地标 dì biāo) runs rampant. However, the heyday of this trend may be gradually coming to an end. Apart from general antipathy from sections of the public toward the cultural pretension and meaninglessness of replicating Europe in China, in early 2016 the Chongqing government made an explicit regulation that residential communities will no longer be allowed to give themselves names that sound "foreign". As a marketing strategy, European names are also starting to lose their appeal.

"In recent years, first-tier city developers' new favorites are names that indicate royalty in ancient China, such as ‘palace', ‘mansion' and the like," says Yan Mei, a real estate sales representative in Beijing. "A European name is already starting to sound corny (俗 sú)."

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com