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Chinese Tourists Rename UK Landmarks With Adorable Results

Have you been to The Forest Of Chivalrous Thieves? Or how about Poseidon's Trident? These names designed to make Britain's landmarks more memorable to Chinese tourists could just catch on...

The Chinese tourist market is huge in the UK but some of our most-loved locations and tourist spots just don't translate well into Mandarin.

So in a bid to help Chinese visitors to our shores decide where they want to visit, and remember what it was like, they've been asked to come up with new names for our top hotspots.

A Tower Allowing Us To Pluck Stars From The Sky (Shangri-La Hotels)
A Tower Allowing Us To Pluck Stars From The Sky (Shangri-La Hotels)

And what they've voted for are really quite charming.

The 101 places that have been given new descriptive names include the Shard, which becomes A Tower Allowing Us To Pluck Stars From The Sky, Loch Lomond, which takes on the impressive title: Mountain Lakes Get You Drunk On Dreams and Brighton's Pavilion, which has been christened George and John’s Indian Palace.

It's not unusual for Mandarin speakers to rename people, places and foods in a way that describes more what they are or what people think of them than their original western names. For example Benedict Cumberbatch becomes 'Curly Blessing', Katy Perry 'Fruit Sister' and Jennifer Lopez 'Lord of Butt' for obvious reasons.

Bendict Cumberbatch... or Curly Blessing (Snap)
Bendict Cumberbatch... or Curly Blessing (Snap)

The new names come from a campaign run by the UK's tourism agency VisitBritain - GREAT names for GREAT Britain. More than 30 million Chinese people visited the campaign and 13,000 name suggestions were whittled down in a social media vote.

It's hoped that the campaign will encourage Chinese tourists to explore every part of Great Britain - not just the capital and the biggest tourist spots.

Giant’s Causeway is a remarkable natural rock formation - created by cooling lava millions of years ago (VisitBritain)
Giant’s Causeway is a remarkable natural rock formation - created by cooling lava millions of years ago (VisitBritain)

In line with this, Giant's Causeway has received the descriptive title: Musical Scale Lava, Padstow becomes Fish Leaping Bay (perhaps Padstein wouldn't have translated too well either!) and Stoke-On-Trent shall be known as Diverse Ceramics.

One of the places that gained the most attention was the Welsh village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, known for having the longest name in the UK. The name voted to replace this tongue-twister is Jian Feu Cun, meaning “Healthy lung village” - because saying the name gives your lungs such a workout.

It's hoped the campaign will encourage tourists to go beyond the capital (REX)
It's hoped the campaign will encourage tourists to go beyond the capital (REX)

There's also a financial element to the name game - the 196,000 annual Chinese visitors to the Isles currently spend £500 million, and the hope is that these new names will encourage them to double that amount by 2020.

VisitBritain chief executive Sally Balcombe said: “Chinese visitors already stay longer in Britain than in our European competitor destinations and are high spenders.

“We’re working closely with the industry and hope to see some of Britain’s most popular points of interest use these new Chinese names on their social media channels and websites to amplify that engagement.”

Brits involved in the tourism industry seem pretty pleased with some of their attractions' new names:

Mario Zanti, general manager of the Needles, just off the Isle of Wight is delighted. He said: “Poseidon’s Trident is certainly a fitting alternative name for the Needles – an association with the god of the sea befits a national coastal landmark of our stature.

"We’ve seen the Chinese market grow dramatically over the past two years and we hope to welcome many more Chinese visitors in coming seasons."

The may originally be for the Chinese, but we can see a few of these names catching on. After all, who wouldn't want to visit A Traditional English World (Chatsworth)?

How many of the names can you guess? Take our quiz to find out!

 

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