China building replica Titanic as tourist attraction

A Chinese shipbuilder started construction Wednesday on a landlocked, lifesize replica of the doomed, "unsinkable" Titantic.

Using the ship's original plans, the replica will be 882 feet long and 92 feet tall and includes reproduced features, including a ballroom, theater and swimming pool.

"Many blueprint fragments found their way into the hands of collectors or remained missing," Su Shaojun, an investor of the replica project, told China Daily. "We spent many years collecting the blueprints from many parts of the world and managed to obtain most of them."

>> Read more trending stories

The cost of the project is expected to be $145 million. It will be permanently docked at a reservoir as a tourist attraction, according to Xinhua, the Chinese state-run news group.

This is not the first attempt at resurrecting the ship, which sank in 1912, taking the lives of more than 1,500 people.

In Australia, a company working to build the Titanic II pushed the opening from 2016 to 2018, according to the Belfast Telegraph. However, construction on the vessel stopped, according to the the Daily Mail.