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.
The complex was developed by China Evergrande Group, the country’s biggest residential real estate developer, which filed for bankruptcy in August 2023.
This January, a Hong Kong court ordered the company to liquidate, as it was unable to restructure the $300 billion that it owes to investors. According to the Wall Street Journal, about 800,000 of the company’s 1.2 million pre-sold units remain unfinished.
Evergrande’s collapse is just the most notable example of an occurrence that is happening all across China. Numerous developers are massively in debt, defaulting on payments, and struggling with losses, resulting in these unfinished housing projects and skeletal would-be communities.
Greenland Group, the developer responsible for the State Guest Mansion, recently defaulted on $400 million worth of international bonds, Chen reported in the video.
