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The train has already left Tomorrowland station. To attract Disneyland to picturesque Penny's Bay on the coast of northern Lantau, the government agreed in 1999 to put up $417 million for a joint venture with Disney, and another $1.7 billion for related infrastructure such as land reclamation and transportation links. The U.S. company is getting a sweet deal: it's sinking $316 million into the project for a 43% stake. Two years ago, Disney moved in with 5,000 construction workers and began shaping the new theme park. Among the first jobs was landscaping: Disney imported 18,000 trees and 1 million other shrubs and plants. John Sorenson, one of Hong Kong Disneyland's chief landscape architects, hired a van and drove through isolated villages in southern China with sketches from designers, searching for the perfect trees. After price negotiations with villagers and meals of fried wasps, teams dug up the trees and hauled them by truck to Hong Kong, including a 14-m-tall, yellow flame-of-the-forest tree, now sitting in Adventureland, a part of Disneyland that takes visitors into the world's exotic jungles.
Yet in many respects, the park looks as if it's been airlifted directly from America. Imagineers used Walt Disney's original designs for the first Disneyland in Anaheim as a starting point. Many Disney classics are present in the Hong Kong park, including Sleeping Beauty Castle, the Space Mountain roller coaster and a Dumbo the Flying Elephant ride. Adventureland boasts a Broadway-style Lion King show and an improved Jungle River Cruise featuring a new grand finale of fire-spewing gods. Tomorrowland is also being updated. Gone is Disney's original, sterile vision of a glass-and-steel future; in its place is a purple spaceport, with a spinning planet and a flying spaceship ride at the center.
Will this thick slice of Americana appeal to the Chinese? Disney executives believe so, banking on the fact that China is eager to connect with a global pop culture that poverty and Communist policy had previously kept out of reach. The Chinese "have heard so much about the parks around the world and they want to experience the same thing," says Don Robinson, managing director of Hong Kong Disneyland. The Chinese, says Kevin Wong, a tourism economist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, "want to come to Disney because it is American. The foreignness is part of the appeal."
Still, Disney's experience in opening parks in other countries has shown that certain adaptations to local tastes are essential. Cultural faux pas have bedeviled Disney in the past. When Euro Disney opened in Paris in 1992, its restaurants wouldn't serve wine, an affront to French dining tradition. The park, which now serves wine and has been rebranded as Disneyland Paris, has become one of Europe's most popular attractions. But the European company is ridden with debt and has been a financial sinkhole. Earlier this year, it finalized a $2 billion restructuring plan, which included new capital and loan concessions, to rescue the operation. Disney has also had the occasional misstep in China. In 1996, Beijing blocked the firm's films after Disney backed Martin Scorsese's Kundun, which dramatized the life of the Dalai Lama and China's invasion of Tibet. (Beijing considers Tibet to be part of China.) Mulan, which tells the story of a girl who fought in the Chinese Emperor's army in place of her crippled father, was originally rejected for showings in China. When Mulan finally hit Chinese theaters in 1999, it flopped at the box office, in part because the story was said to be too Westernized.
This time, Disney is trying to incorporate Asian culture to arrive at a happy theme-park fusion. "We've come at it with an American sensibility, but we still appeal to local tastes," says Sorenson. Fantasyland hosts a garden where photo-happy Asian tourists can always find Mickey, Minnie and other popular characters. Mulan will have her own pavilion, designed like a Chinese temple. Mickey even has a red-and-gold Chinese suit to wear. Restaurants boast Asian fare—from curry to sushi to Chinese mango pudding served in containers shaped like Mickey Mouse heads. The park's designers brought in a feng shui master, who rotated the front gate, repositioned cash registers and ordered that boulders be planted in key locations to ensure the park's prosperity. He even chose the park's auspicious opening date.
Ironically, Disney took this policy of cultural adaptation a little too far by planning to serve shark's fin soup at banquets; the local favorite got yanked from the menu in June after environmentalists, who blame the delicacy for endangering the global shark population, howled in protest. (Company officials said they took it off the menu only because they could not find environmentally sustainable supplies.) "They've bent over backward to make Hong Kong Disneyland blend in with the surroundings," says analyst Dennis McAlpine of McAlpine Associates, a securities-research firm. "Disney has learned that they can't impose the American will—or Disney's version of it—on another continent."
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