China's most famous empty city
Ordos Kangbashi
Built for a million residents in the middle of the Inner Mongolian desert, Kangbashi became the poster child for China's ghost cities, vast and gleaming but nearly empty for years.
In the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the district of Kangbashi was built in the mid 2000s as a gleaming new urban center for the coal rich city of Ordos, designed with striking modern architecture, wide boulevards, public art, and infrastructure meant to house up to a million people. For years after its completion, Kangbashi remained eerily empty, its apartment towers dark at night, its museums and government buildings sitting nearly unused amid roads with almost no traffic, earning it global fame as the ultimate example of a Chinese ghost city, a product of aggressive urban planning and real estate speculation that outpaced actual demand. International journalists and photographers flocked to document the surreal spectacle of a fully built, modern metropolis with almost nobody living in it. Kangbashi's most photographed landmark is the Ordos Museum, a huge silver structure often compared to a spaceship or a giant boulder, standing largely alone against the empty desert backdrop. In more recent years, the city has gradually filled in as government offices relocated there and new residents moved in, though it remains a widely cited case study in the risks of speculative, top-down urban development.
A boomtown's ambitious bet
Ordos grew enormously wealthy from coal and natural gas resources in the 2000s, prompting local officials to invest billions into building Kangbashi as a brand new administrative and residential district meant to relieve crowding in the older city center. Architects designed striking public buildings, wide plazas, and large scale public art installations, betting that a modern, ambitious new city would attract residents, businesses, and further investment.
The empty years
By around 2010, journalists visiting Kangbashi found rows of finished but unoccupied apartment towers, empty highways, and government buildings and museums with barely any visitors, despite the district having the capacity for roughly a million residents. Real estate speculation had driven construction far ahead of actual housing demand, with many apartments purchased purely as investments rather than homes, leaving much of the city dark and quiet after dusk.
The Ordos Museum
The district's most iconic building, the Ordos Museum, is a massive curved silver structure resembling a giant boulder or spaceship rising out of the empty landscape. Completed in 2011, it became an especially popular subject for photographers documenting the ghost city phenomenon, its futuristic design contrasting sharply with the surrounding stretches of undeveloped land and near total absence of pedestrians.
A slow recovery
Since the mid 2010s, Kangbashi has gradually gained population as regional government offices, schools, and cultural institutions relocated there, and housing prices stabilized after years of decline. Estimates suggest the district now houses well over 100,000 residents, still far short of its original million-person capacity, but a substantial improvement over its emptiest years. It remains a frequently cited example in discussions of China's broader real estate and urbanization challenges.
Fun facts
- Kangbashi was originally designed to house up to one million residents.
- For years it was one of the most photographed ghost cities in the world.
- The Ordos Museum, its most famous building, resembles a giant silver boulder or spaceship.
- Construction began in the mid 2000s funded largely by regional coal wealth.
- The district has slowly filled in and now has well over 100,000 residents.
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Text on this page is original Terralocate editorial. Background facts compiled from the public sources listed above. Images via Wikimedia Commons under their respective licenses (typically CC BY-SA or public domain).