There have been a number of recent stories about strange buildings discovered in China, including this story in Yahoo News and this story in the Huffington Post (which includes some great info from Stefan Geens of OlgeEarth). This isn’t the first time that people have discovered strange things in China by using Google Earth, and reminded us of a similar story from 2006, reposted below:
This is one of the most interesting finds in Google Earth in quite some time. A few weeks ago a first time poster, called KenGrok, at the Google Earth Community (GEC) discovered a very exact scale model of some mountainous region located in the middle of a desolate area in north central China. Seen in Google Earth
the huge scale model is .9 km tall by .7 km wide. It is adjacent to what looks like a military base with many camouflaged vehicles.
Last week, the same poster found the location the scale model represents – a region occupied by China but claimed by India near north central India. If you turn on the “Borders” layer in GE you will see they are colored red to indicate the dispute. Another GEC member showed how exact the scale model is by taking a screen shot of the satellite photo of the scale model and overlaying it over the real terrain (turn the image overlay on and off to see how exact it is). This scale model was most likely created for military reasons.
About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
The third link is broken, the one for “overlaying it over the real terrain”. The working href is http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2013/01/11/250837.kmz
KenGrok reporting. I still monitor that site regularily, looking for changes that might be evidenced in new imagery. But, though the facility is still active and maintained, nothing has turned up that might shed more light on its function.
heh – I too saw the original of this from Ken way back and blogged about it http://www.woowoowoo.com/2006/08/07/china-is-our-friend/ my kmz file uses a smaller network image instead of an embedded download, but the effect is much the same. It’s an amazing find.