The Lost City of Ordos

 Our travels around China has taken us to some interesting places. While there have been more beautiful places, none has been more interesting and different than the lost city of Ordos, Inner Mongolia.

    Ordos is not a Doctor Who world over-run by Daleks, but the home of China's biggest property development mistake. About ten years ago, the coal-rich Ordos Government became concerned that the thriving town of Dongsheng (population 300,000) was running out of water. Rather than improving the piping, they decided to build a new city called Ordos (Kangbashi) 20 kilometres down the road next to reserviors. The Ordos Government had images of turning Ordos into a Chinese Dubai, a state-of-the-art city for over a million people. While building plans were impressive, they failed to consider that Ordos's outback location and freezing tundra temperatures may discourage potential residents.

    Recently the Chinese media ran stories claiming Ordos was a ghost town. (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2010-06/10/content_9958768.htm). Having heard about this place, we definitely had to go see it for ourselves to determine (i) whether the stories of the empty streets were true and (ii) whether we thought the Ordos situation was unique or could be repeated across China.

    On arriving in Ordos on a Friday working day in the middle of summer, two things immediately caught our attention. The first was how cold it was. For the middle of summer we were practically freezing. Hardly Dubai temperatures! The second was the scarcity of people. While there were people around the bus stops, otherwise the city was very quiet. We have both recently been reading books and articles on North Korea, and the empty roads reminded us of what we had read about North Korean cities.

   

    We spent a considerable amount of time over two days walking the streets of Ordos. There were about 15 convenience stores, many home renovation stores, a few small hotels and one supermarket open. The supermarket had a few customers and a reasonable array of products.

    The state-of-the art buildings being built in Ordos are amazing. We renamed the most interesting ones The Cake (Ordos Theatre), The Leaning Tower of Books (The "Great" Library of Ordos) and the Blob (Ordos Art Museum). Only the Leaning Tower of Books has been opened, with some books, a massive collection of magazines and Mongolian writings on display. The Leaning Tower of Books was definitely being underused, with more staff than customers.

 

The Cake

The Leaning Tower of Books , The Blob and an excited Molly!

    Overall Ordos is an interesting city, created by a coal-rich local Government that wanted to make a statement. It may suceed, if enough money is thrown at the problem. Andrew has a bet with Molly that the National Government will attempt to save face by making Ordos the provincial capital of Inner Mongolia within the next 20 years.

    Is Ordos indicative of what is happening in the rest of China? From our travelling to over 20 Chinese provinces we have seen considerable over-building. However, the concept of building a Chinese city from scratch is rare. While local governments have acquired a large amount of infrastructure funding from their local financing vechiles, only the richest local governments would have sufficient funds for the enormous costs of building a new city. We think that while badly built housing projects may cause problems around China, no other construction development problem is as systemic and large as the lost city of Ordos.

    Getting there: We recommend staying in Dongsheng and bussing to Ordos since you will quickly run out of things to do in the evenings in Ordos. You take the K21 (RMB8) from the Dongsheng train station to Ordos (Kangbashi) (Last bus back around 7pm-8pm). We stayed at the Hongye Hotel in Dongsheng (Hotel address: 6 Hangjin North Road (Hangjin Bei Lu),E'erduosi.

Hotel address in Chinese: 杭锦北路6号,鄂尔多斯 ) which you can find on C-TRIP and was reasonable with a great Chinese breakfast. From the hotel walk south to the traffic lights and then west and in front of the hospital you can catch the K-21 to Ordos.

In Dongsheng, buy a map since it will probably also contain a map of Ordos.

In Dongsheng, east of the Hongye Hotel is far more lively than West. There is a lovely square about 1km east of the Hongye Hotel (which Molly and I lindy-bombed!) and there are a collection of hot pot resturants in the vicinity.