We feel it is a false attempt to beautiful something that is totally ugly. Inside, under brilliant Florida skies, some 60 painstakingly assembled models of Chinese buildings, temples, pagodas, rock-cut Buddhas and palaces looked curiously bright and perfect, better in some ways than the originals in China. In China there is nearly always a faint brume of coal dust hanging in the air, lending a ghostly, crepuscular quality to the light. Here the sun comes down like a hammer, and all is revealed in an instant. These too, are among the joys of tourism in the real China.
Prices show a wonderful discrepancy as well.
In 1983 it cost only a nickel to visit the Forbidden City in Beijing. Even now the price is a few dollars. Guided tours are extra. Some attractions require you to insert quarters to see figurines move. Besides the Great Wall, half a million tiny bricks one to two inches long, there is Beijing's Summer Palace and Forbidden City, each populated with thousands of tiny porcelain figures, accurately costumed.