Simulacrum and Map

Noon on the square, and the church clock strikes twelve. The selfie sticks freeze for a second. Pastel Alpine houses with wooden balconies ring the plaza, Strauss waltzes pump cheerfully from the speakers, wedding photographers cycle through their poses, tourists frame themselves against the facades, and the whole thing runs without a break, a machine with no off switch. This is a replica of the Austrian village of Hallstatt, built in Boluo County near Huizhou in Guangdong province, southern China.

In June 2011, Monika Wenger, owner of a four-hundred-year-old hotel in Hallstatt, saw blueprints in the hands of a guest from China. They showed the central market square, her own hotel, and other village landmarks, all drawn in mirror image. According to the Associated Press, people from the developer’s team (Minmetals Land, a subsidiary of China Minmetals Corp, the country’s largest metals trader) lived among the tourists, photographing and gathering other data about the village. The mayor of Hallstatt’s file contained a copy of the market square, the hotel, the wooden balconies down to individual planks. “I don’t like the idea of knowing that a team was present here for years measuring, and photographing and studying us,” Wenger told journalists, sitting on the terrace of her hotel. Assuming all measurements and all photographs of a place are true, from the place they together form, what is absent?

In June 2011 the Chinese site held a few low‑rise frames wrapped in bamboo scaffolding and green protective netting. Not a single Alpine peak was anywhere in sight. The nearby lake (future Lake Hallstatt, as the developers called it) was green and turbid, several dead fish floating on its surface. A Minmetals representative explained to journalists that Hallstatt’s tourist core was being reproduced across twenty thousand square meters, and that the replica would include a shop selling Austrian‑style crystal.

The replica opened on June 2, 2012. According to the Shanghai Daily, it was reproduced down to the smallest details, including the statues on the square. The church spire, the square ringed by pastel houses, the angel statues stood in their places. A delegation from Hallstatt arrived for the opening, and Mayor Alexander Scheutz signed an agreement on cultural exchange. According to the newspaper, a Huizhou resident named Zhong Ping says the flowers, too, were fake. The paper presented the pair: a settlement with eight hundred residents, centuries old, the original one, subsisting on tourism; the replica, a residential complex for China’s nouveau riche.

In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a one-paragraph story he attributed to a fictional traveler named Suárez Miranda and dated to 1658. In it, the guilds of cartographers of the Empire created a map that matched the Empire in size and coincided with it at every point. Later generations, less inclined to cartography, saw that the enormous map was useless and abandoned it to the sun and the elements. “In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars.”

In July 2015, a correspondent for the Hong Kong Free Press visited the replica. According to the journalist’s phrase, the quarter had been a ghost town, empty, half a year earlier. The project was conceived as a residential complex, but by 2015 it had turned into a tourist attraction to which wedding photographers bring couples. Mr. Zeng was relaxing with his family on the lawn: He had taken the children to see the landmark, yet the thought of purchasing property never occurred to him, as Boluo lay three kilometers to the west, a distance too great. South of the square stood residential complexes, each in its own European style under its own European name: French Evian, British Royal Garden, German Deutsch Kultur. In the last, Poly Real Estate had built 2,542 houses, and on a mere ten of them signs of life were visible. Every day, buses disgorge crowds of tourists. Kinga Nieroda, a Polish artist who sketched portraits of visitors, noted that Chinese people are fascinated with European architecture due to the difficulty of traveling there. Over the square hung a blue sign with the Minmetals logo and characters that spell out ‘the Chinese dream.’ The sales center inside the church reports that roughly 65% of the units have been sold. The correspondent’s own observation immediately follows in the report, remarking that every single one is vacant. The article’s headline: a town where no one is home.

In 2017, Rogers, Zeckhauser, and colleagues published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They define paltering as the active use of truthful statements to convey a deceptive impression. The research was conducted in a negotiation context: a person who engages in paltering judges their own actions by the truthfulness of each individual statement, and so they told the truth; their counterpart judges by the overall impression, and so they were misled. Counterparts react worst to paltering when it comes as an answer to a direct question. Not a single occupant.

The mayor’s file contained the market square, Wenger’s hotel, the wooden balconies down to individual planks. Nothing more is known of its contents. The hotel owner was shown the blueprints by a guest from China; aside from his involvement in the project, nothing else about him is known. A visitor on the replica square lifts a phone to the church clock, and the shot goes into the feeds.

Jean Baudrillard, in his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, opens with the same Borgesian fable and reads it in reverse: today, the map precedes the territory and engenders it. He says that this story, were it revived today, would concern the territory with shreds that rot slowly across the map. The original Hallstatt: fewer than eight hundred residents, up to ten thousand visitors a day, according to CNN. A spot where crowds gather for the very view already familiar to them from screens.

In May 2023, the village erected a wooden fence where the photographs are taken. A temporary pilot project, it was briefly one of many tests the tourism board had been talking about since 2020, when the conversation turned toward quality tourism. The fence partially blocks the view. The camera searches for the shot.