A shopping mall that cost $1.3 billion to build, with a 25-meter replica of the Arc de Triomphe, a 2.1-kilometer indoor canal with gondolas, a copy of St. Mark’s bell tower, and space for 2,350 stores across 9.6 million square feet. And for years it was 99 percent empty. In this episode we explore the South China Mall in Dongguan, China, how it became the world’s most infamous ghost mall, and how it has spent nearly two decades trying to reinvent itself.

We look at the instant noodle billionaire Hu Guirong who funded the project, the seven zones modeled on Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Venice, Egypt, the Caribbean, and California, and the fatal assumption that affluent shoppers from Guangzhou and Shenzhen would travel to a manufacturing hub of low-income migrant workers with no public transit. We explain the build-it-and-they-will-come fallacy, why a structure this large becomes an economic zombie too expensive to demolish, the green canal water and go-kart parking garage described by visitors, the sale to Peking University’s Founder Group, the 2019 pivot to night markets and a marine park, and the creative accounting behind reported occupancy rates.

• Why building a luxury mall in the wrong demographic was like throwing a black-tie gala in a factory break room
• How the mall inspired Sam Green’s Sundance documentary Utopia Part 3
• The rebrand to New South China Mall, Living City in 2007 and why a new name could not fix a 99 percent vacancy rate
• How shrinking the denominator of gross leasable area can turn empty upper floors into a 91 percent occupancy claim
• What the mall reveals about the limits of top-down urban planning and the future of billion-dollar monuments to shopping