Splendid China Folk Village (Shenzhen)

Splendid China Folk Village is a long-standing flagship theme park in Shenzhen's Overseas Chinese Town district, located beside Window of the World and run by the same state-owned tourism group. Established in the late 1980s, it is one of the earliest and most influential of China's domestically grown theme parks, and a foundational piece of the modern Chinese tourism industry.

The park combines two related experiences on a single site. The first, Splendid China, is a large-scale miniature park in which more than a hundred of China's most famous landmarks — the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army, the Potala Palace, the Leshan Giant Buddha, and many others — are reproduced at reduced scale and arranged across landscaped gardens. Walking the full circuit is a popular way of "touring all of China in a day", as the marketing slogan puts it.

The second half, the China Folk Culture Village, turns from architecture to people. Twenty-four recreated village settlements, each representing a different ethnic group within China's official classification of fifty-six minzu, are populated by performers from those communities. Daily programmes include traditional music and dance shows, craft demonstrations, festival re-enactments, and a large-scale evening performance in the central theatre that brings together performers from across the country.

For international visitors, Splendid China Folk Village offers a useful primer on the geographic and ethnic breadth of modern China. The miniature park is genuinely helpful as an orientation to the country's most famous sites — particularly for travellers still planning the rest of their China itinerary — while the folk village provides an accessible, if curated, introduction to the cultural diversity of the Chinese state.

The park sits at Overseas Chinese Town station on Line 1 of the Shenzhen Metro, an easy day trip from anywhere in the city. Allow a full day to do both halves justice, and stay into the evening if a performance of the central show is scheduled.