About 30 miles outside of Houston (and maybe Seattle?) a Chinese-American philanthropist has built a theme park of sorts about China to ‘improve US-China relations’.
It includes a section where 3/4 size terra cotta replicas of the famous Chinese warrior statues are on display. It is fascinating to see the detail of each statue as an individual.
I have no idea why the theme park was built outside of Houston and it gets very few visitors. The day I spent there I saw less than 20 people roaming the grounds. They were outnumbered by the employees.
One wag said the terra cotta statues, as part of a cultural display, would be ideal places to transship hidden narcotics.
Where is this theme park in relation to Houston? The reason I ask is that when I lived there, a man tried to build an Asian themed shopping center/hotel complex just outside Stafford (which is about 30 mi. outside of Houston). It was not successful and was sitting empty the last time I was there in 2000. The buildings had the roofs turned up at the corners, and everything.
I can’t remember this character’s name, but he was always full of big ideas and wanted to make his complex the “Gateway to Fort Bend County”. He had worked for the US Govt. at one time and had escaped Saigon on one of those helicopters that evacuated the Americans and their allies just before the fall.
I was a newspaper editor at the time (about 30 years ago, and he used to sit around my office and spin tales. His marketing ploy for his Asian Hotel was to make the rooms really cheap, like those in Japanese airports where there was just room for the bed, or a sleeping tube (so people can catch a nap between planes). He thought that “secretaries going to conventions” would be his natural market. We all laughed at him when he wasn’t looking, knowing full well “secretaries” like much posher surroundings. His name was Bill, and I doubt that he is alive today.