• It's extremely weird to see various religious structures (cathedral, giant buddha, greek temple) all created for the entertainment of theme park visitors and not for any genuine religious purpose. ome of the faux-pagodas even had food and burning incense on their altars, suggesting that in spite of their status as fake temples they were still receiving offerings and still being treated with some dignity.

Actually, you got it wrong - the Buddha and pagodas were real and belonged to a chain of temples located on the mountainside around the theme park. We even stumbled upon one (remember when I said "lets NOT do the stairs?") .

Some french colonialists had the mountain made into a resort somewhere around the time of WW1. The sun world park was really just a renewed extension of this project, where the places reserved for worship had existed a long time before that