Once again I've neglected my blogging. At least this time I had good reason, which was finishing up a full first draft of "Haunted Orlando." All the same though, there was plenty of content from "Secret Orlando" that never made it into print. I was hoping to include a chapter about Splendid China, but, alas, the last remnants of the ill-fated amusement park have finally been swept away. It lives on though, in old photos, memories, and now on Terra Incognita Americanus as well.
Happily Never After
Why is there an animatronic panda atop a pagoda in the grocery store?
Despite Disney having transformed Orlando into a global entertainment Mecca, under the shadow of Cinderella’s Castle, not all amusement parks are destined for a fairytale ending. Such is the story of Splendid China, the vestiges of which have long outlasted the park itself.
The concept wasn’t novel when the 75-acre park opened in 1993 – it was modeled after the Splendid China in Shenzhen, China and similarly contained more than sixty, one-tenth scale, hand-crafted replicas of important Chinese cultural and historical sites including the Leshan Buddha and the Great Wall. The People’s Republic of China, which owned the park, invested as much as $100 million in constructing it.
From the outset, however, the Chinese government’s foray in the Central Florida tourism market was plagued with challenges. Early on, several of the performers brought over from China seem to have found their homeland something less than splendid when they applied for political asylum in the United States (after which they were replaced with local talent). There were numerous human rights protests and bans, which hurt attendance. The death stroke came in 2000 when the park’s president, Sunny Yang, was recalled to China amid allegations of financial mismanagement.
After the gates closed one final time on the last day of 2003, a horde of looters and vandals descended upon the abandoned attraction, making off with many of its tiny treasures. Next came the graffiti artists and urban explorers, who were followed by bulldozers making way for Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville Resort.
Still, remnants of the park linger – most notably within a Winn Dixie grocery store (which occupies a distinctly Chinese-looking strip mall). Inside the store, pagodas now house beer, suntan lotion and other miscellaneous goods while animatronic figures now spend their post-park existence looking down upon capitalism in action with smiles forever fixed on their faces.
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