Mandarin Oriental Hotel

One of the more unusual things you will see during a walk around Beijing's Central Business District is the burned-out shell of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. There appears to be no ongoing work at the site, four months since the fire that reduced the planned luxury hotel into the charred hulk that stands alongside the gleaming new CCTV tower near the east side Third Ring Road. What's left of the 44-story wrecked colossus is most starkly seen in the late afternoon sunshine, and it is among the most frightening sights in the Capital, just behind the foaming loogies left on the sidewalks by the city's serial mucous spitters.

I am sure someone, somewhere is discussing how to rebuild the hotel, but my idea for its future happens to be very cost-effective. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel has the potential to become the East's scariest tourist draw: Beijing's original Tower of Terror.

Just leave the building alone. It already has a nasty reputation. As part of the new CCTV complex, the hotel was derided and detested by many Chinese netizens as a symbol of ridiculous State spending. And that was before it burned. The hotel climbed to a new level of bad karma after the February 9 blaze that killed one firefighter and injured a half dozen others. So why not re-open it as China's biggest haunted house? Its operators can follow the successful blueprint from Disney's Tower of Terror thrill ride, where people are seated in a "freight elevator" and suddenly dropped hundreds of feet in the space of a few seconds. They could include scary characters to enhance the experience, including 1) the now-unemployed goofball official who ignored the warning not to use the fireworks that triggered the calamity, 2) city residents displaced by the original multi-million dollar project, and 3) spectators who watched the fire burn while ironically holding sparklers. Just as with Disney's Tower of Terror, these characters can entertain people as they wait in the inevitable long lines to get inside the attraction. That is, when the visitors aren't busy busting into the queue like NASCAR drivers charging out of the pit lane at Daytona.

At Disney's Tower of Terror, the riders are photographed at the moment they're dropped down the "elevator shaft", capturing the instant of stark, raving horror on their faces. In Beijing, there will be voice recordings in which you will not hear anyone screaming. Instead, they'll be chatting animatedly about how the ride isn't scary enough, in which case, real fire might actually be necessary.