Ordos Kangbashi, China's Most Famous Ghost City
Ordos Kangbashi is a city that shocked the world
Kangbashi New Area, the most recent addition to the city of Ordos; and by far its least populous district. Ordos, like so many of the country’s hundreds of new towns, is famous for being empty a symbol, some would say, of the hubris of rampant urbanization. But the few people who live there see it differently.
Kangbashi has been featured in a number of articles and news reports, but is still very very far off the tourists radar, and from our point of view one of the most interesting and bizarre places that we take the intrepid traveller to!
Kangbashi is known as a ghost town. Kangbashi was designed to have more than 1 million people but remains absolutely empty after the project was launched in 2004. In six years, the authority has spent about $2,6 billion to transform the area into a postmodern metropolis with government towers, skyscrapers, museums, libraries, theaters, sculpture squares and luxury dwellings. Despite the fact that almost all of the infrastructure is finished, the lack of schools, hospitals, taxis, high-speed internet, cable TV and entertainment facilities discouraged people to join Kangbashi. If you go there now, you’ll have more chances to meet street cleaners than pedestrians there.
Our trip starts with a free day in Beijing, before we fly to the half finished city of Ordos, where we overnight before taxiing over to Kangbashi, stopping at the huge, yet unfinished mosque and stadium, but going full out city exploration! We’ll look around the giant city square, the mausoleum of Genghis Khan (optional) and empty buildings. As this is a city that is merely “technically” unfinished and has a population of 40,000 (rather than the 800,000 planned for), it offers a great deal of amenities and freedom to travel around.
Thistrip can be done as one of our planned extensions from our current tours, or as a flexible independent package escorted by one of our expert guides.
Join Young Pioneer Tour for one of our most quirky extensions, our trip to the abandoned ghost towns of Inner Mongolia, the district of Kangbashi in Ordos. In the south of the province, where the desert and the grassland meet, the city of Ordos was built from the riches of the local coal and natural gas industry.
To find out more about this tour or for booking and itinerary please contact us on tours@youngpioneertours.com
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