CHINA SCENIC SITE PANNED FOR USING COTTON, SOAPY WATER AS SNOW DUE TO LACK OF WINTER WEATHER
Tourist site shuts down after issuing apology for creating fake wintry scenes, blames warming climate, lack of snow after flood of complaints
A tourist spot in China has apologised and shut down temporarily for making snow with cotton and soapy water to attract visitors after it did not receive the icy precipitation that it had expected.
Chengdu Snow Village, a newly-opened tourist zone in the suburban Chengdu, in southwestern Sichuan province, issued an apology on February 8 because of the artificial snow scene, the Shanghai Morning Post reported.
Since it opened at the end of January, it has been put under the spotlight after visitors complained that the "snow" piled on the top of cottages and scattered on forest paths was in fact cotton mixed with soapy water.
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"I feel cheated. I think my intelligence has been insulted!" one tourist said in a video on a major social media platform.
"The description on its tickets is true, but the snow is fake," wrote another outraged visitor.
Another added: "I wanted to see snow, but you showed me cotton. I am speechless."
A worker at the tourist site's management office admitted the "snow" was made of cotton and it has been cleaned up after a public backlash.
"It snowed every winter in the past. So we upgraded this area to become a tour site and promoted it widely before its opening," the unidentified worker was quoted as saying.
"We were waiting for the arrival of snow. Unfortunately the weather did not side with us," she added.
The tour site closed due to the "big negative impact" caused by the fake snow. The employee did not say when it will open again.
The tourist zone company said in a statement that they had bought the cotton to create a "snowy" environment.
"It did not achieve the result we had anticipated, but left a bad impression among tourists," the statement read.
"We are sincerely sorry for not being able to exhibit a real snow scene and making visitors change their travel plans," it added.
It is not rare for tour sites in China to make headlines because they are forced by the warming climate to adopt unconventional measures to produce man-made scenes.
Last summer, a famous waterfall in central China's Henan province disappointed many visitors who found it incorporated a number of pipes which provided it more water flow during the dry season.
Another tour zone in Henan drew wide attention in December for using cotton and sand to make snow.
"It is warmer than before. We did not have the snow we had expected so much. So we have to make snow by ourselves," the site explained on social media.
"We had hoped through our design and exhibition, that we could produce a scene as beautiful as the natural one."
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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.
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2025-02-18T01:42:24Z