“Four years ago, all mountains,” my local driver Li Wang said as we putted slowly forward in his diminutive, beaten and battered old Japanese car … [Read more...]
Why China Builds So Many Copycat Towns
I once mistakenly tried to enter through the fake door of a fake Iberian restaurant next to the fake windmills of Fengcheng, Shanghai's Spanish town. … [Read more...]
How China Populates Its Ghost Cities
Over the past twenty years China has constructed hundreds of new cities and districts, revamped thousands of towns, and thrown up an almost … [Read more...]
5 Chinese Ghost Cities that Came Alive
Reports of the world's most populated country having tens of millions of empty apartments and dozens of cities without people sounds like a sick twist … [Read more...]
The Story of Ordos Kangbashi, China’s Most Famous Ghost City
Ordos Kangbashi is a city that shocked the world. It shocked the world not because of something it had, but because of what it didn't: people. This is … [Read more...]
Fengcheng: Shanghai’s Quixotic Spanish Town
There was something Quixotic about that place, which was perhaps appropriate as I was standing before a row of giant, mock windmills. They used to … [Read more...]
What Becomes of China’s Ghost Cities
It was a normal outlaying area of a normal small city in the east of China. There was nothing about it that a passerby would find overtly peculiar, … [Read more...]
Nanhui, China’s Unbelievable Ghost City on the Coast
The first thing that many visitors to Shanghai will see is a ghost city. If you look down out of the window when flying into Shanghai's Pudong airport … [Read more...]
How A 4.5 Million Person City Was Named A Ghost Town
Changzhou has recently been named one of 12 ghost cities in China by the China Youth Daily, which is a rather unbecoming label for a city that has a … [Read more...]
A Journey To China’s Italian Ghost Town
I walked clear through Shanghai's Italian town without knowing it. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but the overtly institutional, strictly … [Read more...]
