The ghost town of Ordos is the largest in the world. Ordos – the Chinese “city of the future”, which has turned into the largest ghost town

According to the authorities' plans, about one million people should live here, but the city still remains practically uninhabited. Modern houses, wide avenues, squares and squares were designed by the best architects, but people do not want to move to new homes. Let's find out more about the city.

The Ordos began 20 years ago, simultaneously with the great Mongolian coal rush. Private coal companies opened mines in the Mongolian steppes and dug coal deposits, farmers sold their plots to coal tycoons, their children went to work in the mines, convoys of coal trucks spun into the developed southern cities of China, a bright communist future was just around the corner. Ordos began to grow on coal money.

The city authorities of Ordos decided: their time had come. A large city was planned for a million inhabitants, in the center of which a statue of Genghis Khan was to appear.

They built a huge city with museums, theaters, even a race track and a large stadium. But it still stands empty. People did not go to live in Ordos.

As you know, active urbanization is currently underway in China. Over the next two decades, up to one hundred million rural residents will move to cities. This plan will require up to 7 trillion dollars!

Of course, in such a situation one cannot do without ill-considered spending of budget funds. State banks issued loans on orders, developers built up a huge city, and then many mines in the Ordos area turned out to be unprofitable and closed, there was no work, and the artificial city was left empty.

However, from the point of view of tourism, the city is indeed, if not “the best,” then certainly not bad. At least it is the most famous among China's many ghost towns.

What is striking about the city is its cleanliness. Instead of ordinary pedestrians, there are only municipal employees cleaning the sidewalks. An absurd picture? No, this is the ideal of Russian municipal officials: a city without a population!

China entered the 21st century with an export-oriented economy. The country had a predominantly rural population; most of the goods produced did not even enter the domestic market until recently. The 2008 crisis hit China quite hard. At the same time, it was decided to transform the economy a little and increase domestic consumption. But how can you increase consumption when you have 700 million rural people who, if they buy anything, buy a new plow every 10 years? People began to be moved to cities!

Local resident Zhang Huimin moved to Ordos from the village to enroll in the Ordos branch of the Beijing Institute. He says: “I like it in Ordos. There's a lot you can do here. For example, go for a walk with friends, go to the library, go to an empty shopping center."

There are no traffic jams in Ordos.

Empty buses roam the streets. There are no people at the stops...

How many people live in Ordos? There are no official data (apparently because there is no one to count). Local authorities avoid answering the question “What is your population?” They answer: “It is growing.” Judging by the latest estimates, they are not lying: in a few years the population of this area has grown from 30 to 100 thousand inhabitants.

Ordos has Mongolian Disneyland, as well as the Ordos Wedding theme park, filled with endless statues with a romantic theme. There is even a Marital Longevity Square, as well as a Traditional Chinese Love Culture Zone.

The building of the local party institute...

Empty neighborhoods...

By the way, there is even a local travel agency in Ordos. “We mostly play telephone games, well, Angry Boys, Tetris, that’s all,” says travel agency employee Van Lily, “What a joke, they pay us on time, they don’t delay.”

Local resident Li Yongxiang says: “I used to live over there (points to the built-up areas), cultivated the fields, grew potatoes and radishes. Now I have neither potatoes nor radishes, but now I live in a six-story building with heating!”

A very strange place. A city without people.

They even offer bike rentals here.

Some buildings remain unfinished.

It may seem to you that it is 5 am and therefore the streets are empty... No, it is 2 pm.

Empty houses, empty streets...

The main bridge in the city, here you can meet the first cars.

Everything is very well maintained, flowers everywhere, perfect lawns, cleanliness... but there are no residents.

There were supposed to be luxury villas on the shore of the lake...

But they were never completed.

Art Museum.

Builder.

Another huge villa.

The houses are slowly being destroyed.

No one vandalizes them, since there are not even vandals in the ghost town

Many houses were abandoned unfinished when they realized that no one would live here.

The construction cranes were removed and the workers went to build other ghost towns. There are many of them in China. In addition to Ordos, which has become the most famous, there is, for example, Chenggong, an empty satellite city of 6 million Kunming. Many government institutions were moved there, including the Kunming administration, but people are still in no hurry to move to new buildings.

Or the town of Qianducheng - the Chinese tried to build a copy of Paris near Shanghai. Now this suburb, designed for 100 thousand people, is uninhabited.

There are many such points on the map of China. Qingshuihe, Dongguan, Suzhou, Xinyang... The Chinese, apparently, enjoy building ghost towns so much that they decided not to limit themselves to their own country.

Nova Cidad de Kilamba (New Town of Kilamba), Angola

This city near Angola's capital Luanda was developed by the China International Property Investment Corporation (CITIC). It is designed for half a million residents, there is a ready-made infrastructure, but no one lives in these colorful houses.

If the Chinese are too lazy to build an entire ghost town or add a ghost district to a metropolis, they build a huge shopping center. Also a ghost, of course. So in 2005, New South China Mall, one of the largest shopping and entertainment complexes in the world, opened in Dongguan. It is second only to the famous DubaiMall. The building is designed for 2,350 stores, but due to mistakes made during construction (the complex is located on a remote outskirts) it is almost completely empty. It cannot be called abandoned: the complex is maintained in working order. But there are no buyers there, as well as sellers.

Let's return to Inner Mongolia. In Ordos there is the same drug addict horse as in the capital of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot! The monument communicates that Ordos is a major tourism center. This is partly true. Tourists come here to look at the empty city!

The theme of horses is popular here, as throughout Inner Mongolia.

Even the local race track is made in the shape of a horse.

There are few people in the shopping center, but most of the shops are empty. They don't even turn on the lights everywhere.

House accordion.

government building

Opposite there is a monument to Genghis Khan. Why Genghis Khan? Yes, because this great ancient commander one fine day rode on his horse across the endless plains somewhere in the Ordos region, which he liked so much that he called it “a paradise for those old and young.” Grateful descendants did not forget this to him. Now, according to the behests of Genghis Khan, posters “The best city for tourism” hang here.

central square

Mostly former peasants live in Ordos. After Ordos made headlines in Chinese and international media for its emptiness in the early 2010s, the local government took a drastic step: officials went to surrounding villages to persuade local residents to move to Ordos and become city residents for a small compensation.

Not all peasants liked this idea. Mao Shiwen says: “Here (in the village) I heat the stove with wood, I get water from the well, and there are some towers there, it’s not clear how to lower a bucket into the well from such a height!”

But the authorities did not give up. Sometimes we had to resort to tricks. For example, schools and hospitals began to be moved to cities, as a result of which living in the countryside became very inconvenient.

The most unusual building of the national museum.

Beautiful. There are a lot of people here (by Ordos standards). This is probably the most popular place among the few residents of the ghost town.

This is where people spend their free time.

Let's go inside!

Almost all the halls are closed... the museum is empty.

There is a plastic dinosaur in the center.

As I wrote earlier, there is a collective farmer in every Chinese. You can invite good architects, build a cool building, and then put flowers in some idiotic pots, like in a general store.

The museum administration also did not like the stylish modern elevator; they decided to add plastic grass and beautiful ashtrays.

In order to somehow “revive” the boring modern elevator, they put a fashionable rug in it.

This is what China is all about.

A local theater where nothing happens.

A stadium where nothing happens.

The stadium building has already begun to collapse.

There is dry grass on the field.

After many village residents moved to Ordos, the most stubborn collective farmers had to do the same. Now the authorities are faced with a new problem: how to turn yesterday’s hillbillies into real, stylish residents of a brand new city.

innovation worker Lu Xiaomei says: “Of course, we don’t set ourselves the task of turning them into hipsters, but we released a brochure “How not to piss on the side of the road, not to spit on the asphalt and not to wash your hair in a public toilet: 10 simple ways.”

Note to snobbish residents of Russian cities: hillbillies in Ordos are taught not to park their carts on the sidewalks and not to play loud music, many of you could use such courses too.

Another place where a few inhabitants gather is a giant sand dune. They ride down it like they ride down a snow slide.

Ordos becomes an experimental site for large-scale relocation of peasants to cities. The Chinese government plans to move hundreds of millions of peasants to cities over the next two decades: it remains to be seen how they can adapt there.

Great for living, but also full of ghost towns, shopping malls and ghost airports - giant infrastructure projects that sit empty for years. The Chinese authorities announce that these facilities are being built “to grow” and will sooner or later be filled with people, clerks, passengers or tenants.

At the same time, the government artificially “accelerates” the economy - such projects (this includes roads that few people drive on, warehouses filled to capacity with copper or aluminum) add 1-1.5 percentage points to the annual GDP growth rate.

The Ordos ghost town in Inner Mongolia province began to be built in 2003. Despite the fact that Mongols make up only about 17% of this province, it was decided to build the city in the Mongol style (hence its name, associated with the word “horde”).

As a result, by 2010, a city designed for 1 million people was built on an area of ​​355 square kilometers (by the way, the population density in it is 4 times less than in Moscow - by the way, even super-populous China can afford to build spacious cities , but this is a topic for a separate article). However, by the end of 2013, Ordos was only 2% populated - 20 thousand people live in it.

The main investor-developer in 2008-09 set housing prices here at 10-11 thousand dollars per sq. m. m, today they have fallen almost 2-3 times - to 4-4.5 thousand dollars. However, these prices are unaffordable for the vast majority of residents of the Inner Mongolia province, where average salaries are 400-500 dollars.

The Chinese government intends to buy some of the empty space in Ordos for retired military personnel, but there will be no more than 20-25 thousand of them here (i.e. another 2-2.5% of the city’s population to the current 2%).

All these years after the commissioning of the objects, management companies are forced to incur losses while maintaining the infrastructure of the empty ghost town - repairs, street cleaning, security, street lighting, landscaping, etc. - and this is up to 10-12 million dollars monthly. This money was allocated to the developer by Chinese state banks in the form of a loan at a low interest rate.

The Ordos project itself was started in the Kangbashi region after huge reserves of coal and other minerals were discovered here. The area was instantly developed with office skyscrapers, administrative centers, government buildings, museums, theaters and sports facilities. Many residential areas with beautiful, cozy mansions for middle-class people were also built.

The only problem is that this area was intended to be home to 1 million people, but now almost no one lives there. At the current pace of settlement, the ghost town of Ordos will be completely populated in 40-50 years.

Ordosin China - a modern ghost town. The Kangbashi district, designed for more than a million residents, remains deserted even five years after the start of construction.

The construction of the Kangbashi area began as part of a government project in Ordos, a city located in the province Inner Mongolia, whose source of wealth is coal mining. The area is built up with office buildings, administrative centers, government agencies, museums, theaters and sports grounds, as well as residential areas. But there is one problem. In an area designed for more than a million inhabitants, almost no one still lives. Despite the fact that most of the property has already been purchased and it was planned that the area would be populated by 2010, Kangbashi is still empty.

Photo by Michael Christopher Brown.

Why is China building ghost towns?

Images of these ghost towns (after countless billions of dollars spent on design and construction) show that no one lives in them.

Is China planning to emerge from the pole shift as the only civilization on the planet intact?

Over the past decade, China has built several new, modern cities, but huge parts of these cities, and in some cases entire cities, remain vacant. Perhaps, in the event of disastrous earth changes, Chinese leaders are planning to evacuate coastal Chinese cities? Is China planning to emerge from the pole shift as the only civilization on the planet intact?

The cities built in China are not the result of the efforts of corporations, but the result of the efforts of the state, since it has a communist government. These ghost towns would not remain a secret if they were created by corporations, as the corporation would advertise new residences for sale. Moreover, their development by corporations would not include government buildings, highways, or pay attention to infrastructure. Corporations are expanding construction around existing infrastructure, constructing public spaces or buildings on fragmented plots of land. Why is China doing this, given that this is a state initiative? Please note that these ghost towns were built north of the so-called failure belts, - strips of land north of the Himalayas, adjacent to the east coast.

Local residents joke: “Nothing grows here except empty houses.”

Dai District, Huizhou City, Guangdong Province, covers an area of ​​more than 20 square meters. km. Over the course of several years, it has been actively developed and has a fully formed infrastructure. However, for several years now about 70% of the living space there has been empty, which has turned it into a real “ghost town.”
According to the Chinese newspaper Daily Economic Bulletin, the new Dai district is located 70 km from the Shenzhen metropolis; literally in a matter of years it was completely built up with both residential, administrative and business buildings. However, on the wide streets between high-rise buildings it is very rare to see passers-by.

Since real estate prices in this area are 4-5 times lower than in neighboring Shenzhen, residents of the metropolis bought apartments here. But they did this solely as an investment, hoping that over time the prices for this property would rise. They themselves do not live there, they only visit occasionally.
Their assumptions turned out to be correct; over the past few years, property prices in the area have more than doubled. On average, a square meter now costs 5,000 yuan ($714).
Especially in the evening, the new city looks like an area after an epidemic, in which a small part of the population has survived. You can rarely see light in the windows of high-rise buildings.
“All the apartments here have been sold a long time ago, but most of the owners do not live in them. Less than 20% of the residents live here permanently,” says a security guard at one of the neighborhoods.

Local residents joke: “Nothing grows here except empty houses.”
Forensic Asia Limited in its report points out the existence of numerous empty areas in China, the so-called “ghost towns”.
The Zhengdong New Area of ​​Shenzhou, Henan Province has been named the largest "ghost town" and a landmark area of ​​the real estate bubble in China. The area began to be built in 2003, it covers an area of ​​150 square meters. km. For several years now it has been less than 40% occupied.
After this information was widely publicized in the media, a local official completely rejected it in an interview with the Chinese Business newspaper. In turn, he stated that the current occupancy rate of new buildings is 90%, and the number of residents of the Zhengdong region has already exceeded 300 thousand people.
However, according to the same authorities, more than 30% of the planned development of the area has already been built, and the population level given by the official is only 7.5% of the planned number of residents, which by 2020, according to the project, should be 4 million people .
The next famous ghost town in China is Ordos in the Inner Mongolia region. It is designed for more than a million residents, but for five years practically no one has lived there, although most of the apartments have long been sold.

Last year, Chinese media reported that the State Grid Company of China conducted a study in 660 cities. As a result, it was discovered that the electric meters of 65.4 million apartments had zero readings for six months. This suggests that no one lives in the apartments. These apartments are enough to accommodate 200 million people.
Chinese economist Xie Guozhong believes that 25% - 30% of new buildings in China remain empty. According to him, the area of ​​residential premises in Chinese cities is 17 billion square meters. m, which is enough to accommodate all the residents of China.
When the financial crisis began, many Chinese businessmen began to transfer their capital from production to real estate in order to somehow avoid bankruptcy. Thus, many houses and apartments in the country were bought just for the sake of investing money. But this was also the main reason for the sharp increase in real estate prices, which the authorities still cannot bring under control.

It seems that China is preparing to receive a lot of people. Moreover, the population is not poor (the cities are clearly for the wealthy and accustomed to comfort).
It is they, no less, who are preparing for the moment when the Earth will jump onto the celestial axis, turn over, the climate will change, and the Chinese deserts will become blooming gardens.

In 2003, the Chinese authorities decided to build a million-plus city near discovered deposits of coal and other minerals. It’s not hard to guess that only huge mineral reserves could force the authorities to build the city. Online magazine Factinteres will tell you about the ghost town of Ordos.

The city of Ordos (Inner Mongolia) was originally designed for a million inhabitants. Therefore, cultural and sports facilities were built in the city, and several architectural projects were implemented. However, the city remained practically empty.

During the construction process, it was found that there was no demand for housing under construction. According to some information, demand has not arisen due to high taxes and high housing costs. This kept many families from moving to this city.

Another reason for the lack of demand is its location. The "New" Ordos is located just a few kilometers from the "Old" Ordos, which is quite prosperous. People simply don't see the point in moving. As of 2010, more than 90% of Ordos apartments were empty. The remaining 10% was taken by builders and officials.

Over the past few years, the Chinese government has repeatedly lured residents to Ordos. There were promises of free apartments and generous compensation. Only the population size has not changed significantly. In the area of ​​32 kilometers, many government institutions were moved to Ordos, counting on the relocation of government employees.

There are many branches of good universities in Ordos. Some of the constructed apartments were converted into dormitories and occupied by students.

According to official data, the number of inhabitants in the city is 100,000 people. However, many do not believe this information. It is likely that officials are hiding the real figure so as not to reveal the urban planning disaster.

The officials’ mistake was to believe that all they had to do was build a city and the residents would come. Proof of this is the ghost town of Ordos. The lack of desire to move from rural areas to cities could significantly affect China's economic health.

The city of Ordos in China was founded on February 26, 2001. According to plans, about one million people should live here, but the area still remains practically uninhabited, even 5 years after the start of construction. In this article I will talk about Ordos in detail.

There is a lot that is not said about this place on the Internet, and as a result, you may have confusion in the numbers, since everywhere it is indicated that the population of Ordos is one and a half million people. This is actually true, but this population lives in the old Ordos, here we are talking about a huge area called New Ordos, which began to be built after the discovery of rich mineral deposits here

Translated from Mongolian, Ordos means “Palace”. In fact, this city is richer than Beijing. The per capita GDP here is $14,500, which is one of the highest in the country. With modern, even futuristic architecture, the vast city of New Ordos nevertheless remains virtually empty. The population density here is only 17.8 people per square kilometer. For comparison, in New York the density is 10,194 inhabitants per kilometer, in San Francisco this figure is 6,688 people, and in Madrid - 5,293 people. You can read more about this in our article about the largest cities in the world by population density

The Ordos project itself was started in the Kangbashi region after huge reserves of coal and other minerals were discovered here. The area was instantly developed with office skyscrapers, administrative centers, government buildings, museums, theaters and sports facilities. Many residential areas with beautiful, cozy mansions for middle-class people were also built. The only problem is that this area was intended to be home to 1 million people, but now almost no one lives there

Investors actively began to build and purchase real estate in the city. But despite the fact that at the moment almost all the houses have already been sold out, people are in no hurry to move into them, despite the active persuasion of the authorities


In the photo below, a few workers are cleaning up the public library building. As mentioned above, the city has the second highest GDP per capita after Shanghai, surpassing even Beijing

Workers carry foam panels up the steps to the Ordos Museum, which is still under construction:


A giant sculpture with two horses is installed in the central square of Kangbashi

The main streets and highways here remain empty even early in the morning and during rush hour


Despite the shortage of residents, construction in the city is progressing actively.


Kangbashi is still waiting for its inhabitants, who will sooner or later fill the city, because China’s population is the largest on planet Earth