A winter festival in China is facing some heat after visitors arrived expecting to see snow but were instead greeted with blobs of cotton.
Organizers behind the Chengdu Snow Village project in southwestern China recently issued an apology via Chinese messaging service Wechat, per Reuters.
“In order to create a ‘snowy’ atmosphere the tourist village purchased cotton for the snow … but it did not achieve the expected effect, leaving a very bad impression on tourists who came to visit,” the statement released on Feb. 8 said.
Visitors to the festival posted photos online of balls of cotton scattered over the bare ground. What appeared to be bedsheets intended to look like snow drifts were on placed on rooftops, CNN reported, per people.com.
The attraction opened to celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday. It has since shut down and is being investigated by Chengdu’s culture and tourism bureau on suspicion of false advertising.
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Unusually warm weather at the site in Sichuan province is to blame for the absence of actual snow, event organizers said.
“Following the precedents of previous years, we typically have snow in winter. So we set up this spot for photoshoots in advance to wait for the snow to come,” a staff member told the state-run Global Times, per CNN.
“However, this year, the weather didn’t cooperate, and it didn’t snow,” the employee added.
In a statement issued on Feb. 11, the culture and tourism bureau noted that “During the Spring Festival, we received feedback from tourists that ‘there is no snow in the Chengdu Snow Village in Nanbaoshan Tourist Area, Qionglai City,’ and immediately transferred the matter to Qionglai City for disposal.”
The bureau determined that “the situation was true, and the owner was immediately ordered to dismantle the fake snow scene in the Snow Village project and do a good job of refunding tourists.”
Chengdu’s culture and tourism bureau said it would use this situation as a learning experience to “further strengthen supervision and guidance of the city’s tourist attractions, tourist resorts and emerging cultural and tourism venues, and urge them to standardize management and operate with integrity.”
The fake-snow fest has drawn comparisons to the failed Fyre Festival. That luxury music festival was meant to take place in the Bahamas in 2017. A Willy Wonka interactive experience in Glasgow, Scotland, in February 2024 was similarly criticized.