China Firm Recreates Austrian Village in Huizhou for $1 Bil.
By wchung | 15 May, 2025

A tiny Austrian mountain village is being painstakingly recreated in its entirety in a mountainous area in the southeastern part of Guangdong province at a cost of nearly $1 billion by a Chinese real estate developer, according to Global Entrepreneur.

The village of Hallstatt, located on the banks of the Hallstatter See in Austria’s gorgeous Salzkammergut area, was designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 1997 not only for its spectacular vistas but the magnificence of its architecture. Its high quality reflects the area’s longstanding prosperity due to its association with salt mines prized by the Habsburg Empire. The entire town has a population of only 800.

Last July China Minmetals Corp decided to build a replica of Hallstatt in Huizhou at a cost of 6 billion yuan ($945 million). A staff of 100 was sent to Hallstatt to spend several months reducing the town and its environs down to precise measurements and specifications.

The chosen location in Huizhou actually offers a small lake and a mountainous backdrop much like those in Hallstatt and was chosen for that reason.

By early March the exteriors of the replica village had been completed and work is now being done on the interiors. The buildings are open to public tours run by the Minmetals-Hallstatt community. On March 17 the company held a presentation at a local hotel to offer 404 villas for the first phase of its sales campaign. Each village offers between 2,000 and 4,000 square feet of living space and are priced to sell at a cost of about $48 per square foot or about $95,000 to $190,000 per villa.

Chinese developers have built replicas of various European and American locations in the past. In 2006 a German town was recreated in the form of Anting New Town in Shanghai.