Matryoshkas, or Russian dolls, are sets of wooden figures of decreasing sizes placed one inside the other. With a Russian name and a long Russian history, you might be slightly surprised to discover that the world’s largest Russian doll, is in Manzhouli, China.

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.

The Singapore Flyer is a 150 metre-tall observation wheel located on Marina Bay, overlooking Singapore’s city centre – and for the moment, it holds the title of the world’s largest observation wheel.

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.

Today sees the finals of the first ever Olympic Bicycle Moto Cross competition which takes place here at the Laoshan Bicycle Motocros Venue in Beijing. BMX racing is brand new to these Olympics, and races take just over 30 seconds round a winding and bumpy 400m-long course.

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.

This is the huge Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, which used to be the winter residence of the Dalai Lama (the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan people), until the current 14th Dalai Lama fled in 1959 following a Chinese invasion and the failed uprising that followed. The building contains the sacred gold stupas of the previous eight Dalai Lamas.

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.

This is the brilliantly bizarre-looking National Aquatics Centre, which is better known as The Water Cube. The building is perhaps best described as resembling some sort of “bubble cake”, and when it’s lit up, it looks pretty incredible.

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.