In the early 2000s Dongsheng, the urban center of the Ordos prefecture in Inner Mongolia, was booming on coal, but its water was running out and the Ordos Desert was creeping toward the city. In 2003 officials decided to build a new city for a million people on a 355 square kilometer site about 25 kilometers away, chosen because it sat next to three reservoirs, paving over two former villages to lay down the grid. It began as a development zone and became Kangbashi New District. By 2010 planners had poured an estimated 1.1 trillion yuan, roughly $161 billion, into a 35 square kilometer core that could house at least 300,000 people, yet only 20,000 to 30,000 lived there.

Al Jazeera filmed its empty boulevards in November 2009, Time followed in April 2010, and the ghost city label stuck, with reports of 70 percent vacancy in new homes as late as 2014. In 2017 writer Wade Shepard argued in Forbes that judging a five year old city was premature. The government had already moved its offices from Dongsheng in 2006, and the State Council approved Kangbashi as a county-level district in 2016. Top schools followed, setting off what Nikkei Asia called education fever.

• A five story mall, a municipal library, and evening fountain shows built before the residents arrived
• Population reaching around 153,000 by 2017 by Shepard’s count, and almost 120,000 in a 2021 report
• Only about 500 of 40,000 apartments built since 2004 still on the market by 2017
• Housing prices up about 50 percent on average by the end of 2015, with around 4,750 businesses operating
• Ordos Number One High School and a campus of Beijing Normal University drawing families into the district