Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The closest thing we'll ever have to Smurfs

Meet the Kingdom of the Little People. This is a village / amusement park in Kunming, Yunnan, China, populated entirely by the dwarfs of China. To qualify to live there, you have to be less than 130 centimeters tall (51 inches) tall. And the people who do live there put on shows, including various singing and dancing numbers and other live performances.



Tickets run about $10 in US dollars, in this bizarre attraction founded in 2009. From the tourism trade, the dwarf village is self-supporting enough that the residents can enjoy a commune lifestyle in a small town built specifically to their scale. However, by the daytime and showtime they pretend to inhabit a fake mock-up village that's supposed to look like mushroom-land...

...but looks more like a quarry of stone-age rockets if you ask me.

There's also a bit of controversy, with critics saying this is demeaning to people with dwarfism. Could be, but nobody's forcing them to live there. Also, dwarfs often find work in entertainment, quite a lot of it geared to small stature.