Visitors to the Danish capital need not miss the city's famed Little Mermaid statue this summer even though the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale heroine has gone to China.
The bronze statue was hoisted from its Copenhagen harbour home, boxed and sent to Shanghai in late March to be shown as the centrepiece of the Danish pavilion at the Expo 2010 World Fair until the end of October.
Tivoli amusement park, Copenhagen's No. 2 tourist draw, has opened for its 168th summer season featuring a substitute mermaid statue.
A granddaughter of the sculptor Edvard Eriksen has lent a family-owned "sister" sculpture to Tivoli so that visitors to Copenhagen would not miss seeing the mermaid while the artwork is away, Tivoli officials said this week.
The surrogate, a similar, slightly smaller mermaid figurine rather than a copy, now rests upon her rock in a pond in Tivoli, one of the world's oldest amusement parks, which gets about four million visitors yearly.
