Ordos City
Mongolian desert herding settlement that became China's richest city per capita when coal was discovered. Built a new district for 1 million—labeled the world's biggest ghost city. By 2024, Kangbashi reached 130,000 residents. Pivoting to clean energy.
Genghis Khan dropped his riding whip here and declared the grass so rich he wished to be buried in this spot. Eight centuries later, the Chinese government dropped billions of yuan on a new city district and found nobody wanted to live there. Ordos—Mongolian for 'many palaces'—sits in a bend of the Yellow River in Inner Mongolia, atop one of Earth's largest coal deposits. For most of its history it was a desert settlement of a few thousand herders tending goats for cashmere. Then China's industrial boom discovered what lay underground.
In the early 2000s, coal extraction turned Ordos from obscurity into one of China's wealthiest cities per capita, briefly surpassing Beijing in per-capita GDP. The local government invested the windfall into Kangbashi, a gleaming new district designed for one million residents—wide boulevards, a monumental Genghis Khan Square that dwarfs Red Square, museums designed by MAD Architects, and apartment blocks stretching to the horizon. By 2011, when journalists arrived, they found a ghost city: infrastructure for a million, inhabited by a few thousand. Kangbashi became the global symbol of China's property bubble, speculative excess, and top-down urban planning divorced from organic demand.
The ghost city narrative has a second act that received less coverage. Kangbashi did fill up—not overnight, but gradually over a decade. By 2024 the district's population had reached approximately 130,000 and continues rising. Schools opened. Shops followed residents. The pattern resembles ecological succession: pioneer species (construction workers, government employees relocated by mandate) established conditions for secondary colonizers (families seeking affordable housing, businesses serving the growing population). Ordos also pivoted: cashmere production—accounting for roughly one-third of China's total output—diversified the economy beyond coal, and clean energy investment is positioning the city for a post-coal future.
But coal still dominates. Ordos produces over 700 million tonnes annually, making it China's largest coal-producing city. The Mausoleum of Genghis Khan—a AAAAA-rated tourist site that contains neither the Great Khan's body nor, since the Cultural Revolution, any authentic artifacts—draws visitors to a monument of symbolic rather than material value. This captures something essential about Ordos itself: a city built on the idea of wealth (coal reserves, future populations, Mongol heritage) rather than on current demand. Whether clean energy replaces coal revenue before the deposits are exhausted will determine if Ordos becomes a case study in successful transition or the largest ghost city that ever briefly came to life.