China's Fake English Village Overtaken by Wedding Photography

Thames Town has much of what you'd expect to find in a quaint English village--cobbled streets, Tudor architecture and a Gothic church. But it's actually just a full-scale replica of such a place, in the suburbs of Shanghai, created in 2006 as a cool place for students and hipsters to hang. It was a flop, though, and soon became a ghost town--until photo-happy brides and grooms caught wind of it, that is. Now the entire town serves as an atmospheric backdrop for an endless stream of elaborate wedding-photo shoots, with a whole slew of them usually happening at once, often side-by-side. Talk about surreal.--Beth Greenfield