Deserted ghost towns in China

In the early 2000s, the Chinese government threw all its efforts into the construction and development of large cities. It is for this reason that today we see many skyscrapers, large business centers, and residential buildings built according to the latest technological inventions. This process does not stop to this day, and therefore if you ride around China today, you can stumble upon real ghost towns. Large, equipped with everything necessary for life, but never know it...

12 PHOTOS

1. What happens to cities when developers have a lot of funds and ambitions, but no buyers at all? That is what we are going to talk about today...

2. Unfortunately, the Chinese are better known than anyone else in urban planning and managed to break many world records in this area. Everything that is sketched on a piece of paper or in an editor on a laptop can look really bewitching, but, unfortunately, never come to life ...

3. It may seem to you that every engineer can draw an architectural project and make a beautiful presentation of it, but the only difference between such projects and those cities in China in question is that they are really built, and their development has gone far beyond the boundaries of the paper sketch...

4. Three Chinese cities became the heroes of this photo project: "Chinese Manhattan" Yujiapu Financial District, "Chinese Venice" Meixi Lake, and "The best city for tourism" Ordos.

4. The last one, Ordos, is really popular with tourists, but only as a ghost town. The huge city is populated by hardly 5%, and even then, not without the efforts of the state, which pulled rural residents into an empty metropolis.

5. In the city of Ordos, museums, theaters, a stadium, a race track, and even its own analog of Disneyland, have been rebuilt. There is literally everything here! ... except for the inhabitants.

6. "Chinese Manhattan" suffered a similar fate: a copy of the New York Island was conceived as the largest financial center in the world. But the city was built on the site of a simple fishing village.

7. The scope of this town is really not a joke: it has its own Rockefeller Center and even the twin towers. The total area of Yujiapu Financial District office centers has reached nine million square meters! Just think about these numbers...

8. Unfortunately, for 2020, the vacancy of these places is 100%. A similar fate befell Meixi Lake, the city on the lake or "Chinese Venice".

9. Around these cities, huge and empty, many legends and fantastic theories arise, which create a special atmosphere in them ...

10. Some of these theories say that ghost town were built in case of another world war. According to the assumptions, if real cities are destroyed, the Chinese will not be able to waste time on their restoration, but simply move to ready-made “understudies”.

11. These three ghost towns in China are part of the Unborn Cities photography project. Kai Sammer, the author of the project, incredibly accurately conveyed the atmosphere of cities that went all the way from a paper project to real buildings and structures but were never born ... On the one hand, it's sad, but on the other, incredibly beautiful. In my own way.