Picture a thriving coastal village of over 2,000 people in 500 hillside homes, alive with diesel engines and the smell of salt and fish. Now fast-forward a few decades to find every street and rooftop swallowed whole by a thick blanket of creeping green vines.

This episode looks past the viral post-apocalyptic drone shots of Houtouwan to uncover the human mechanics behind the photos, a story of the unforgiving pace of economic progress and how fast nature reclaims what we abandon.

• Why a village just 40 miles from Shanghai became a ghost town, doomed by no deep-water ports and no bridges
• How Shanghai’s industrialized trawlers in the 1990s made traditional fishing unprofitable, with catches not even covering diesel costs
• The vertical collapse: from 2,000 residents to a handful by 1994, officially declared depopulated in 2002
• The 2018 rebranding as Green Heaven, with former residents now commuting back to sell tickets at their own childhood homes
• The unresolved mystery of people known to be living among the ruins in 2015, complicating the clean ghost-town narrative