The park opened in 1993 and has drawn over 3.25 million visitors per year as of 2025. Its 130 reproductions span every inhabited continent, arranged by region: European landmarks cluster in one area, Asian monuments in another, the Americas and Oceania and Africa each given their own territory. The organizing logic mirrors atlas geography, letting visitors navigate from Stonehenge to Mount Fuji to Machu Picchu in the course of an afternoon.

Most landmarks have been reproduced at 1:15 scale, though the Eiffel Tower — at 108 metres (354 feet) — occupies a special place. It functions as the park's visual anchor: visible from across the grounds, it orients visitors the way the real tower orients Paris. Around it stand the Arc de Triomphe, the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre Pyramid. A miniature Paris in a miniature world.

The sheer inventory of what Window of the World contains is staggering. In Europe: the Acropolis, the Colosseum, Venice's canals, Neuschwanstein Castle, the Kremlin, the Winter Palace, Buckingham Palace, the Uffington White Horse. In Asia: Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, Borobudur, Persepolis, Mount Fuji, Himeji Castle, Hagia Sophia. In Africa: the Pyramids of Giza, Abu Simbel, the Lighthouse of Alexandria. In the Americas: Niagara Falls, Machu Picchu, Christ the Redeemer, Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon.

The totem poles and longhouses of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest stand near Moai statues from Easter Island. Uluru rises beside the Sydney Opera House. The breadth is the point: the park aspires to nothing less than a comprehensive portrait of human civilization, pressed into the space of a Shenzhen district.

Window of the World opened when Shenzhen was still proving itself — a city barely a decade old as a formal Special Economic Zone, growing at a pace that felt more like invention than development. Building a park that claimed to contain the whole world was consistent with the energy of the place: large, self-confident, and fundamentally optimistic about what could be accomplished quickly.

The park sits in western Shenzhen, accessible by metro and bus from the city center. It occupies the same Nanshan District as Splendid China, the park that miniaturizes China's own landmarks — a street apart, the two parks bracket an unusual experiment in cultural compression. Together, they present both Chinese heritage and world heritage at walkable scale, a vision of accessibility that the city of Shenzhen seemed particularly eager to build.

A faithful reproduction of a famous landmark involves choices. How do you represent the Great Wall without the landscape it traverses? How do you convey Machu Picchu's verticality at 1:15 scale? The answers at Window of the World are often clever, sometimes imperfect, occasionally surprising. The park does not pretend the originals are unnecessary — it works better as a prompt than as a substitute, sparking curiosity about the actual places.

One curiosity: the park's reproduction of the Ruwanwelisaya in Sri Lanka is mislabeled as the neighboring Jetavanaramaya. Such small errors are almost inevitable at this scale of ambition. Three million visitors a year seem undeterred. The park's entry sign — a soaring archway past which a miniature planet Earth rotates — announces exactly what awaits inside: the whole world, compressed, available, and ready for an afternoon.