The biggest ghost town in China

A huge statue of the mighty warrior Genghis Khan presides over Genghis Khan Plaza in Ordos New Town. The square is vast, fading into the snowy mist on a recent Sunday morning.
Genghis Khan Plaza is flanked by huge and imposing buildings.
Two giant horses from the steppes rise on their hind legs in the centre of the Plaza, statues which dwarf the great Khan himself.
Only one element is missing from this vast ensemble - people.
There are only two or three of us in this immense townscape. Because this is Ordos, a place that has been called the largest ghost town in China.

Most of the new town buildings are empty or unfinished. The rampant apartment blocks are full of unsold flats.

If you want to find a place where China's huge housing bubble has already burst, then Ordos is the place to come.

The story started about 20 years ago, with the beginning of a great Mongolian coal rush.
Private mining companies poured into the green Inner Mongolian steppe lands, pock-marking the landscape with enormous opencast holes in the ground, or tunnelling underground.
Local farmers sold their land to the miners, and became instantly rich. Jobs burgeoned. Ceaseless coal truck convoys tore up the roads.
And the old city of Ordos flourished as the money flowed in.
The municipality decided to think big, too.
It laid out plans for a huge new town for hundreds of thousands of residents, with Genghis Khan Plaza at the centre of it.
It is common practice in China where there is a big grey market in private loans to private businesses who cannot get money from the big, official, state-owned banks.
Mr Li's private financier naturally invested the money in property, and paid him interest every three months at the rate of about 40% a year.
Mr Li had put the equivalent of over $1m (just over £600,000) into such schemes.
For two years they paid out, but last year the interest payments began to dry up.
Then one of the financiers disappeared.
This has become a very familiar story in China now, one that is making big headlines as some famously rich private finance people come up for trial on charge of huge financial irregularity. China's 68th richest woman, Wu Ying, is facing the death penalty for schemes she ran in her 20s.
At least half of Mr Li's money now seems to have disappeared.
As a Mongolian, he told me he was very angry when it happened last year. But now his mood has changed to a curious, fatalistic resignation, quite unlike Genghis Khan.
"Once we were rich, and now we're poor again," said Mr Li, with something like a wry grin.