The Story Behind the Many Ghost Towns of Abandoned Mansions Across China

The Chinese government had big plans for its real estate—so how did it end up with hoards of abandoned mansions across the country?

Take the State Guest Mansions, a development envisioned as the palatial homes for the upper crust of society.

Now their only residents are hurdles of cattle and the occasional adventure explorers meandering like ghosts around the arched verandas and stone façades of hundreds of abandoned villas.

Located around the hills of Shenyang (about 400 miles northeast of Beijing), the development was originally planned by Greenland Group, a Shanghai-based real estate developer, and broke ground in 2010.

But as AFP reports, within two years the project had come to grinding halt, leaving the half-formed skeletons of imitative royalty in its wake.

Today the crumbling estates are still abandoned, left in an eerie series of rows appearing like an architectural cornfield.

(Makeshift pens corral cattle and other farm animals. Photo: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images)

Local farmers have begun plowing the land between villas for future crops.

Would-be garages of the abandoned mansions are now repurposed as storage for hay bails, and modest two-rail fences corral herds of cows between properties.

(A model of the development is seen in the sales center. Photo: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images)

(Developers had already made significant progress on the homes when the project was abandoned. Photo: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images)

The interiors of the abandoned mansions are perhaps even more poignant.

A heavy layer of dust and scraps of garbage are the only furnishing in the rooms, a stark contrast to what appears to be marble floors and columns, crystal chandeliers, coffered ceilings, and intricate marquetry.

In what would have been the sales center, a model of the completed 260-villa neighborhood still sits.

“These (homes) would have sold for millions—but the rich haven’t even bought one of them,” a farmer named Guo told AFP.

(The plowed fields of the development were originally expected to be the verdant gardens of the homeowners. Photo: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images)

Nearby is an abandoned high-rise complex, which Jonathan Cheng, a reporter for the the Wall Street Journal, visited recently and documented in a video on the paper’s website.

The complex was developed by China Evergrande Group, the country’s biggest residential real estate developer, which filed for bankruptcy in August 2023.

(Another abandoned development in Huangshan, China. Photo: Zhang Peng/LightRocket/Getty Images)

(Forest City in Malaysia is largely empty, despite being planned to house 700,000 people. Photo: Aparna Nori/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Ref: The Story Behind the Many Ghost Towns of Abandoned Mansions Across China (architecturaldigest)

Photo Credit- Jade Gao/ AFP / Getty Images- Zhang Peng/ LightRocket- Apama Nori/ Bloomberg