Campus Copycats
Hebei Academy of Fine Arts in Baoding, Hebei Province, has brought to life the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the Harry Potter series
From the Sphinx to the Great Wall of China, the White House to Hogwarts, copies of the world’s iconic landmarks – real and fictional – are springing up on school campuses across China.
An arts academy in Hebei Province boasts a campus inspired by the Harry Potter series. At least two colleges in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, have cloned the United States Capitol. A giant Sphinx has been erected in a college in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, alongside Easter Island’s iconic stone head statues.
Many of these schools lack name recognition, and so use distinct campus architecture to set themselves apart in a bid to attract students. They are often found in China’s less cosmopolitan yet aspirational second- and third-tier cities. Some are joint ventures between foreign schools and local administrators, which attempt to use Western-style or hybrid architecture to symbolize their educational features.
The clones do not come cheap. Wuhan International Trade University spent some 50 million yuan (US$7.3M) filling its campus with global landmarks including France’s Arc de Triomphe. East China Jiaotong University’s Institute of Technology in Jing’an spent as much as one billion yuan (US$146 million) to turn its campus into the Forbidden City.
The showy structures have divided Chinese opinion. Some say the buildings bring an air of worldliness. Others criticize them for lacking originality and argue schools should spend their money on educational facilities and talent, building libraries and laboratories instead of paying costly homage to icons from elsewhere.