I went on a trip from Shanghai to Shantou City, to spend my new year vacation in a warmer and prettier place.
Foreign tourists, like my mentors, like to go to places like Sanya in such times, Shantou will sometimes be mentioned, but most Chinese people regard this place as a “Hostile to Non-locals” city, and won’t recommend foreigners visiting.
For my first day experience in the central region, that’s certainly the case. We (me along with one friend) were offered super over-priced food in some stalls, like, 45 yuan(~$8, an absurd price for a small vendor in China) for this meal, which most contains just flour.
The second day, we went to Nan’ao Peninsula. It is a scenic spot near the city, but things on it is beyond ordinary scenery.
What’s more interesting to us is the status of many apartments on the peninsula. We rented two E-bikes and went around Nan’ao, taking many photos along the way.
We started our trip in the Nan’ao county, which is the main area of the peninsula. Several bus lines are arranged here, two of them go around the peninsula just like what we were planning to do, others go back and forth between Shantou city and Nan’ao county.
This building next to the central road already felt post-apocalyptic to us, it has a certain Kowloon Walled City feeling, but instead of filled with desperate people, it’s partially empty. It made us wonder, what happened to those empty windows? Who was in there, or had there been anyone in there?
Along the way we saw many well-designed real estate installments here and there, but almost none of them actually have people in it. Some of them are kept in a half-decent state like this one, but most of them were left with just a shell.
I discussed with my friend the cause of this phenomena, and we figured out that, these apartments are just remnants of the passed rapid expansion period of the Chinese real-estate business. The pandemic stalled the Chinese economy, while also seriously damaged tourism service offered by Nan’ao county.
We also found other interesting buildings, including these ones, which try to mimic a minimalist Northern-Europe style.
Another thing, the power of this peninsula, is completely wind-based, which is pretty impressive. They have both off-shore and mountain-based wind generators; Wind blows to the land during the daytime, then turn to the ocean during nighttime, this way the county has infinite and clean power.
You can barely see the off shore ones in the first pic of this blog.
Lots of tourists! But the buildings behind us – are also abandoned! These buildings are directly facing the ocean and looks really nice, but for some reason no one wants to buy them.