The “streets” are about 20 metres wide, and the pattern occupies a rectangle measuring about 1km x 1.8km, aligned north to south and so sharply defined that it almost appears superimposed on the image. If you zoom in, though, you can see that the lines really are there on the ground.

Exploring the surrounding area, things get weirder. A short distance to the west are what appear to be a series of runways in various states of repair. But where are the support buildings and access roads?

At the northern end of one runway, there seem to be bomb craters. Could these be fake runways built as aerial bombardment targets? These mysterious blue-roofed buildings also seem to have been blown up.

Further west again, what’s this? Another big maze rectangle, this one looking old and faded. And just beyond… a circular arrangement of vehicles, planes and… other stuff, laid out over a 12-pointed star pattern. Another target? The plot thickens!

Frankly, we could fill a week’s worth of postings with the odd stuff on display around here. What are all these suspiciously regular shapes filling dry river beds, with signs of excavation and vehicle tracks? Could they be giant sandbags being filled and then carted off for construction work? If so there are thousands of them!

If any readers have any theories (or if anyone in the Chinese military happens to be reading!) then we’d love to know. One thing we do know, thanks to Google Earth’s historic imagery feature, is when the “maze” in our first photo was built. A photo dated April 14 2005 shows it partially completed, but by May 30 it was all finished.

Thanks to Garret.

Locations: China / Categories: Aircraft, Buildings, Deserts, Other Vehicles, Weirdness

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Beijing-South is the Chinese capital’s hub for high-speed rail travel, and is Asia’s largest train station.

Upon its completion, the Beijing-South became the third passenger rail terminal in central Beijing, focusing on long-range inter-city travel. It replaced the comparatively minuscule Yongdingmen Station, which until 2006 had operated continuously for over a century.

Resembling an airport more than a traditional passenger railway station, the new Beijing-South Station boasts 24 platforms with the ability to send 30,000 passengers per-hour¹ zipping off to their destinations. The massive oval-shaped structure encompasses 320,000 square metres² with a waiting area that can accommodate over 10,000 passengers.

Designed to incorporate natural light as well as be environmentally-friendly, Beijing-South Station is a model of energy efficiency. Its central glass roof holds 3,246 solar panels that generate nearly all the building’s electricity!

The station was designed in a joint venture between Tianjin Design Institute and architect Terry Farrel, creator of such notable works as the Peak Tower in Hong Kong, and for you James Bond fans, the SIS building³ on the banks of the River Thames, London.

Requiring 60,000 tonnes of steel and 490,000 cubic metres of concrete to build, the Beijing South Railway Station took a workforce of 4,000 less than 3 years to construct. Looking at Google Earth historical imagery from August 2005 and April 2007 gives a great perspective to the massive scale of this project.

For some great pictures of the interior of the railway station, check out this blog.

Thanks to the Google LatLong Blog.

Locations: China / Categories: Buildings

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The statue alone is 128m tall, and it stands on a 20m tall lotus throne, which in turn stands on a 25m tall pedestal – giving the structure a total height of 153m.

The statue – including the lotus throne – is 128m tall. Its original 25m tall pedestal gave the structure a total height of 153m. However, recent information shows that the hill it was built on has been constructed into an additional pedestal. The total height is now believed to be 208m. Panoramio has several pictures, and this image in particular gives you a sense of just how immense this monument is (and shows the new pedestal under construction.)

Little is known about the Spring Temple Buddha in the West, so it likely wasn’t listed on Wikipedia when Alex wrote the original post. It was constructed in 2002 in response to Taliban bombing of Buddha statues in Afghanistan, as well as to thwart Indian plans to create the world’s largest statue.  I haven’t been able to find any vital statistics about it, but this image seems to show that the toes alone are close to 2m high.

The world’s second largest statue is the Laykyun Setkyar in Myanmar, which is so new (completed in 2008) that we only see it partially constructed on Google Maps.

At 116m on a 13.5m pedestal it is barely taller in total than the Spring Temple statue alone. Panoramio has a few pictures of the completed structure, which also show that it is, interestingly, located near a reclining Buddha which, at 90m in length, would probably be the world’s 9th tallest statue if it was upright.

As it is also located in a somewhat secretive country, detailed statistics are similarly hard to find. The regime consistently claims it is the world’s largest though, despite evidence to the contrary.

The world’s third largest statue is Ushiku Daibutsu in Japan. It was featured in the original Very Large Buddhas post, though there is new imagery that shows it in greater detail.

Thanks to Lukasz for the link to the reclining Buddha, and to Alex for letting me update his original post.

Locations: Burma, China, Japan / Categories: Buildings, Monuments, Structures

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The Turning Torso was designed by world famous Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava (some of whose work we’ve featured in the past), and represents part of a growing trend for elaborately warped and twisted “torqued towers“.

In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park the new M.H. De Young Museum was completed in October 2005 – replacing the original building that had been damaged in an earthquake. To prevent damage to the new building, it can move almost a metre thanks to a system of sliding plates and fluid dampers. It’s also entirely clad in copper, which will eventually oxidize, taking on a green colour reflective of the surrounding vegetation.

From many places around the park, the most striking feature of the building is the 44 metre Hamon Tower, the impressive twist of which can be clearly seen from both an aerial and ground-level point of view.

Tower designers aren’t just rotating their towers either – although still under construction in Google’s images, the China Central Television Headquarters building was completed in December 2008, and its design almost defies belief. Especially when you consider that this area is also prone to earthquakes!

Technically the CCTV building isn’t a traditional tower, but rather a “continuous loop of six horizontal and vertical sections covering 381,000 square metres of floor space”. This is probably best summed up by the building’s local nickname – “Big Shorts”.

There are several other torqued towers around the world that are either in planning, or already under construction. However I wonder how many of them will be delayed or cancelled due to the current economic climate?

• 1 World Trade Center, New York City, (formerly known as the Freedom Tower), will have a roof set at 45° from the bottom.
• The Infinity Tower, Dubai, will feature a 90° twist like the Turning Torso, but will be nearly twice the height.
• The Chicago Spire, Chicago, also designed by Santiago Calatrava, will be 160 metres taller than the Sears Tower.
• The Burj al-Taqa, Dubai, will feature a twisted hyperboloid design, and will generate all its own energy.

Finally, check out the totally insane Signature Towers and equally ludicrous Dubai Towers Dubai which are both planned for construction in Dubai.

See the amazing skyscraperpage.com for more jaw dropping future skyscrapers.

Thanks to stephan and Vectoor.

Locations: California, China, Sweden / Categories: Buildings, Shadows, Towers

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SMP Skatepark has an incredible 13,700 m² of skateable space, much of it incorporating local stone and granite. The park has two street skating areas, multiple bowls, a full pipe (video), a 52 m long wooden vert ramp, and a 2000 m² competition area.

The closest rival to the SMP park in sheer size is not where you might expect. Not that a skating holiday in the Cayman Islands would be anything less than totally freaking awesome of course.

The Black Pearl skatepark is a 4,800 m² concrete park with a wide selection of bowls, transitions, and street terrain. If you get bored of all that skating, the blue area to the south is actually a surfing machine that’s capable of moving around 570,000 litres of water every minute, producing a surf wave over 3 metres tall!

All of which makes me wish I was 16 again.

For more skateboarding sights, see our posts on Marseille Skatepark, Kona Skatepark and Danny Way’s Mega Ramp.

Thanks to WebUrbanist.

Locations: China / Categories: Large Type, Stadiums and Sport

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This 30m high replica Matryoshka was built in 2007 to act as a tourist attraction. It features pictures of Chinese, Mongolian and Russian girls to reflect the ethnicities of the region. The plaza also includes 200 smaller dolls decorated with famous people from around the world.

This Inner Mongolian city is China’s busiest land port of entry, handling 60% of imports and exports to Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as trains between Beijing and Moscow. The huge train yards and station indicate the importance of rail in this region.

The border between the two countries is marked by another impressive plaza, gates and the usual posts of officialdom.

Photos of the doll and other areas of the city can be seen at Panoramio.

Thanks to Micradott.

Locations: China / Categories: Other Vehicles, Structures

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The next tallest observation wheel is the Star of Nanchang (sadly not-yet-built in Google Earth¹, but here’s a ground-level photo), which was the world’s tallest from when it was built in 2006, right up until the opening of the Singapore Flyer in February 2008. This is odd, because at 160 metres the Star of Nanchang should never have lost the title!²

It transpires that the Singapore Flyer has been built on top of a three-story building, taking it to a total height of 165 metres and into the record books. What a con!

Observation wheels seem to be de rigueur these days³ – just last weekend Melbourne got in on the act with the 120 m Southern Star, which we can see under construction on Australian Street View.

Elsewhere, Germany is busy building the Great Berlin Wheel (location), which at a planned 175 m would take the title from the Singapore Flyer.

Unless of course China gets there first, as the Beijing Great Wheel (location) is due to be completed first, and will rise to a staggering 208 metres.

All of which is great news for the Great Wheel Corporation, who will then be the owners of all three of the tallest observation wheels in the world.

There’s lots more at Wikipedia about the Singapore Flyer, the Star of Nanchang, the Southern Star, the Great Berlin Wheel, and the Beijing Great Wheel.

Thanks to John Andresen and Glenn Baker.

Locations: Australia, China, Germany, Singapore / Categories: Theme Parks

View in Google Earth

Um… yes, those of you paying attention will notice that despite Google updating their Beijing coverage, the updates don’t appear to have extended this far, so the actually very cool looking course is only visible as a rough clearing at this time.

However, the US team needed to practice for this event, and the course they had built at the United States Olympic Training Center, California, is visible¹. So, despite no two BMX courses being exactly the same, we get a pretty good idea of what the Chinese one might look like from above.

The dark semi-circles are actually huge tarmac corners that in Beijing yesterday saw several dramatic spills and collisions. World Champion and GB gold-medal hope Shanaze Reade (19) crashed quite hard on the first corner, but still managed to qualify for today’s finals on her second run².

There is actually a 3D model of the Beijing course visible in Google Earth, for anyone who wishes to get a closer look at the exact layout of the course!

Thanks to VGT.

Locations: California, China / Categories: Stadiums and Sport

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The 117 metre-tall palace is built at an altitude of 3,700 m, and measures 400 metres by 350 metres across. The thirteen storeys of building contain over 1,000 rooms, 10,000 shrines and about 200,000 statues. At the south base of the rock is a large space enclosed by walls and gates, where a series of shallow staircases leads to the summit of the rock.

Since the Chinese Government formalised their occupation in 1959, most of historical Tibet has been known as the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. To this day, human rights organisations around the world continue to accuse the Chinese government of persecuting and oppressing the local population, while the Chinese government maintains that Tibet has “ample autonomy”.

Today the Potala Palace has been converted into a museum, and the Dalai Lama resides in India, from where he is head of the Tibetan Government in Exile.

The Potala Palace Wikipedia page has more historical information, and there’s a wide range of excellent photographs available at Flickr. For more information on the occupation of Tibet, visit the Free Tibet website.

Thanks to Faine Greenwood, Krystal and Steve.

Locations: China, Tibet / Categories: Buildings, Monuments

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During the Beijing Olympics the centre will host the Swimming, Diving and Synchronised Swimming events, and is situated within Olympic Green, right next to the Bird’s Nest Stadium where the opening ceremony was held on Friday.¹

The design of the steel space-frame that makes up the building is actually based on a theory originally posited by great Victorian physicist Lord Kelvin. The idea was further developed in the 90s, and suggests that a combination of dodecahedra and tetrakaidecahedra (12 and 14-sided shapes respectively) can be used to divide space into cells of equal volume with the least surface area between them. In the case of the aquatic centre, thus maximising the amount of light entering the building, and helping to reduce the cost of heating the pool!

The frame is wrapped in a transparent form of Teflon called ETFE, and the building is the largest ETFE clad structure in the world – bigger even than the world’s largest greenhouse, the previously featured Eden Project. ETFE allows more light and heat penetration than traditional glass – apparently accounting for an equivalent 30% decrease in heating costs.

More about the National Aquatics Centre at Wikipedia, and an informative article about theoretical physics is available from The Guardian.

Locations: China / Categories: Buildings, Stadiums and Sport, Watercraft

View in Google Earth