I got another interesting China Vimeo movie to show you. This one, called Ordos, is about a group of skater who went all around this newly built city in Inner Mongolia skating all over the place. The city had millions of dollars poured into it, creating the infrastructure for a million residents, yet it is virtually abandoned, and the locals call it the ghost city. This video is beautifully shot and really shows the huge abandoned city in a unique way.
ORDOS from Charles Lanceplaine on Vimeo.
After watching this video, I was intrigued and looked into Ordos. Located in north central China it didn’t even exist 12 years ago. It was “born” in 2001 when it was renamed Ordos, which means ‘palaces’ in Mongolian, and government money soon followed. Unfortunately, people didn’t.
There are buildings after building that remain empty and lifeless (though most of the units are sold, the owners just live elsewhere) as does suburban townhouse complexes. You can see some interesting pictures of the city over at Time.com. It was built for 1 million inhabitants, but only has about 30,000 as of 2010. There is also a huge fountain in the city center (which you can see in the video) despite Ordos being located near two deserts, and being known for having regular water shortages.
Nobody does giant, grand, sweeping, creepy, empty cities like China and I’d really like to see this someday. Unfortunately I don’t have plans to head that way anytime soon, but I’m adding Ordos to my list of places to see in China. I’ll get there someday.
I just came back from there. It’s beautiful and I loved the space and lack of crowds. I even got stared at like in the good old days in taiwan. Now I’m just another laowai
Haha, I guess you were sill the foreign ghost in the ghost city. 😉