Double take!
AFTER TITANIC II, THE TOP 10 REPLICAS
★ SHE was the biggest passenger ship of her day – and now a full-size replica of the RMS Titanic is being planned by a billionaire.
As we reported yesterday, Aussie Clive Palmer is planning to build a luxury Titanic II, a reboot of the lavish liner that sank in 1912 with the loss of 1,500 lives.
★ But, as JAMES MOORE reveals, it wouldn’t be the first grand design to get a carbon copy...
1 Clock this: In Kolkata, India, drivers at one main junction might be surprised to see the Kolkata Time Zone Tower, below right, a one-third scale replica of London’s Big Ben, built in 2015.
2 Clone me: A full-scale replica of Britain’s ancient Stonehenge built in Esperance, Western Australia, in 2011 uses 50-tonne granite blocks to represent it intact, rather than in ruins.
3 Homer from home: The classical Parthenon in Athens has a same-size doppelganger in Nashville, Tennessee. It was built in 1897 to look like the 5th Century Greek one when it was new.
4 Taking the Pisa: There’s a half-size replica of Italy’s famous 12th Century Leaning Tower of Pisa in the town of Niles, Illinois. A ventilation tycoon had the reproduction built in 1934 as part of a park for his staff.
5 Taj twin: Filmmaker Ahsanullah Moni had a £45million copy of India’s Taj Mahal in Agra built in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for poor people who couldn’t afford to visit the original. The attraction opened in 2009.
6 What an Eiffel! There are more than 80 replicas of Paris’ Eiffel Tower worldwide. The biggest, in Tokyo, Japan, is coloured red and white and stands at 1,091ft high, slightly taller than the original.
7 Raise your game: The Chinese city of Suzhou has a startling fullsize replica of London’s Tower Bridge. Oddly, this one has four towers rather than two and no raising mechanism.
8 Dupe statue: When a Portuguese cardinal saw the 98ft statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the 1930s, he had a similarly sized one built overlooking Lisbon. It opened in 1959.
9 Tomb much? King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings became so overrun with tourists that an exact facsimile was built a mile away in 2014 using a 3D laser scanner for pinpoint accuracy.
10 Ship of fooled: You’d be forgiven for thinking that Mayflower II was the same Mayflower that took the pilgrims to America in 1620. It was constructed using the same plans in 1956 and even sailed across the Atlantic like the original.