BEIJING—Famous for its fakes, China now appears to have taken its legendary ability to copy other people’s products to a new level for the digital age: the completely fake Apple store.

For a nation of 1.3 billion people, four Apple stores in two of China’s biggest cities have never seemed enough.

Now, an enterprising entrepreneur in the southern Chinese city of Kunming has taken matters into his own hands, opening his own Apple store with the style and seductiveness of the real thing.

PHOTOS: Fake Apple store

On Wednesday an American expatriate blogger reported stumbling across the dazzling new find in her very own neighborhood.

China has a well-earned reputation for producing illegal knock-offs of luxury brands such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Rolex.

But an entire Apple store is believed to be a first.

Apple’s products are wildly popular here. A report this year detailed how one young teenage boy sold his kidney to buy an iPad.

“This was a total Apple store rip-off,” wrote the blogger, known as BirdAbroad, who supplemented her report with acres of photos. “A beautiful rip-off – a brilliant one – the best rip-off store we had ever seen.”

The attention to detail in the store is astonishing, she reported, right down to the staff’s electric blue T-shirts with official Apple insignia and bulky name tags.

“Being the curious types that we are,” wrote BirdAbroad, who toured the store with her husband, “we struck up some conversation with these sales people who, hand to God, all genuinely think they work for Apple,” she noted.

Apple spends an enormous amount of money, time and design resources on its full-service retail outlets to create a unique experience for its customers. The stores are a key component in the company’s marketing strategy.

The hardwood and stone flooring, the sleek stainless steel, a spiral staircase to that “weird upstairs sitting area,” all the signature Apple touches are present in the Kunming store, she wrote. And there were products, all with Apple logos.

Whether they were real or “fell off the back of a truck somewhere,” BirdAbroad could not say.

The store in question, in the city’s Zhengyi St., is not authorized by Apple to sell its products.

In an email exchange with the Star, the blogger explained that the Zhengyi St. store is not one of the 13 Premium Reseller (non-Apple stores authorized to sell Apple products and use Apple logos) or authorized Apple stores the company lists on its China website.

Yu Jing, manager of the store, acknowledged Thursday that it was not one of Apple’s authorized dealers but insisted its products are authentic. She would not divulge how the store actually obtains them.

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BirdAbroad noted that when she stumbled on the store she was disinclined to believe it was real given that Kunming is “the end of the earth.” The city of 6.8 million is more than a three-hour flight from Beijing.

“But seriously,” she wrote, “China warps your mind into believing that anything is possible, if you stay here long enough.”

As she left the store, she stumbled on two other similar outlets within walking distance, one emblazoned with the words “Apple Stoer” at its entrance.

Apple’s media desk at its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters did not respond to voicemail messages requesting comment.

But the Kunming Apple story highlights yet again a persistent problem in China. Despite government pledges to crack down on piracy and the production of counterfeit goods, recent weeks have seen a deluge of reports showing that counterfeiting is not just alive and well in China but thriving.

Only days ago, the European Commission reported that it had seized 1 billion Euros worth of fake goods at its borders in 2010 – 85 per cent from China, up from 64 per cent the year before.

And last week, China’s ongoing piracy saga was given added dramatic flair with reports that one of the country’s most exclusive imported furniture chains, catering to China’s powerful nouveau riche, had been unmasked for making some of its product, not in Italy as advertised but in derelict factories in the Chinese countryside.

Doris Phua, CEO of furniture maker DaVinci, wept and wailed in a high-profile press conference denying the charges. But even as she spoke, customs officials revealed the company had used fancy footwork to produce official import papers, storing the Chinese-made goods in a special duty-free zone near Shanghai, then “importing” them back into China.

But for sheer chutzpah, nothing can trump a group of developers and architects in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Last month the 800 inhabitants of the idyllic Austrian hamlet of Hallstatt reacted with horror when they discovered that their entire village – a UNESCO World Heritage site – was being replicated in detail in China, right down to the local Catholic church.

With files from Lesley Ciarula Taylor

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