After 50 Billion Yuan, China's Man-Made Ancient Towns Are Sitting Empty

Eight years and more than 50 billion yuan of investment: that is what China has spent building brand-new "ancient towns" — replica historic streets with grey tiles, stone bridges and shops selling roughly the same snacks — according to an analysis now circulating on Baidu's top-trending board, where the topic holds the third slot with 7.7 million searches. The verdict it draws is blunt: many are now "collectively silent," cold and half-empty, and the cause is a development model the industry calls "heavy on property, light on operations."

CCTV's Focus Interview programme picked the most instructive example this week: Dayong Ancient Town in Zhangjiajie, Hunan. The project cost 2.443 billion yuan, aimed to be a national tourism benchmark, and projected revenue of nearly 500 million yuan a year. Instead, since its trial opening in 2021 it has lost money every year — 1.08 billion yuan over four. Of its 198 shops, most sit empty; admission is free, and the visitors are mostly locals out for a walk. The only part of the operation that turns a profit is the parking lot.

The company behind it is now insolvent and in judicial restructuring. The town's own management told the programme — in a post summarizing the report that spread on Weibo — that the project copied the era's hit formula, Wuzhen and Pingyao, with the market research done "subjectively" and the money spent on construction rather than the unglamorous work of running a destination. The report's phrase for the failure is the same one circulating on Baidu: 重建设、轻运营 — build heavily, operate lightly.

The irony is geographic. Zhangjiajie receives tens of millions of visitors a year for its real, unreplicable scenery — the sandstone pillars that inspired the floating mountains of Avatar. The man-made town added nothing the landscape did not already supply, and tourists noticed. In the analysis, this is the pattern: a replica street can be built anywhere, so it differentiates nowhere, and the shops that fill it are the same shops in every other replica street.

The context matters: this year's Golden Week produced record trips on the rails, but spending stayed cautious — travellers are choosing carefully, and replica streets with 198 identical shops are the first thing they cut. The deeper pattern the analysis points to is not taste but incentives. A "man-made town" is, in the local-government ledger, a property development dressed in tourism: once the buildings are sold, running the destination well is someone else's problem. The buildings, unlike the tourists, always arrive.