Eight years ago, the previous rulers of Myanmar (the country formerly known as Burma) announced that the capital would be moving from Yangon to Naypyidaw. Yangon was a lively urban center. But Naypyidaw is more like a ghost town. Abandoned cities are:
The city of Naypyidaw, Burma, is a very curious city. It is the Burmese capital, but few people have heard of it, and even fewer have actually visited it. It is a multi-billion dollar, empty monstrosity located in the middle of the jungle.
Foreigners and workers don’t want to visit, let alone live in the abandoned city. Most people prefer to commute daily from the more lively city of Yangon. An enormous amount of money was spent on the idea of housing millions of people. Yet there are hardly any people living there, very few workers there, and the city looks to be almost vacant. The streets are designed for lots of cars and people, but they are practically empty, which is quite a mystery. There are theories that under the city is a maze of underground tunnels being built by technicians contracted from North Korea.
One resident says, ‘This city is mainly for government staff, government buildings...it’s not very interesting here. Most people are not that happy; they are just living here because they can earn money because they can work here.’
One strange site in Naypyidaw is the airport. There are a few workers at the brand-new airport, but it is practically empty and has remained unused since it opened in 2011. It has been recorded that the city’s population is at 1 million, but most people believe this is an exaggeration. There are some nice housing developments, but they are pretty much empty. You can see the roads are desolate as well. The exception to housing is for some civil servants that live there.
Naypyidaw was supposed to be a globally recognized tourist center with shops and restaurants, but that didn’t really happen. Instead, there are odd tourist sites like the Flight Cafe, where a plane crashed and was turned into a restaurant.
Human history is known to have witnessed civilizations come and go. Some have survived, and some have been completely wiped out for different reasons. It seems as if nothing lasts forever; places, life, and things are lost, and creation and destruction are just part of a neverending cycle. With civilizations gone, cities and towns also disappear and vanish, or they are emptied of people and life and turned into ghost towns.
The largest abandoned ghost town is the city of Ordos in northern China. It was initially built for more than a million residents, and this city was going to be the splendor of Inner Mongolia. Unfortunately, this futuristic metropolis is now sitting alone and empty out of the deserts of northern China. Sadly, only 2% of its buildings were ever filled while the rest are falling apart; they sit abandoned and are only home to ghosts, which gives the name China’s Ghost City. It is a strange and abandoned metropolis of Ordos, with just a few thousand people living there.
A ghost town used to be a populated, active community at some point, busy with people and life, but has since been abandoned by almost all or nearly all of its residents. Every continent has its ghost towns. These ghost towns happen for different reasons: they could be financial, economic, resource-related, climate-related, natural disasters, war, armed conflicts, dam construction, pollution, and nuclear disasters. Certain ghost towns still have constructions and human-built structures, while others are completely empty or contain only traces of the foundations of buildings as reminders of people who used to live there. These ghost towns are mysterious, bizarre, and eerie.
One of the most common reasons a town becomes a ghost town is when its residents leave and abandon it for economic reasons. For example, if a specific industry that supported the entire town’s existence stopped operating, then that would immediately mean the end of financial existence for the people inhabiting the town, and they would start moving out and leaving the town in order to find new jobs and better life in other cities. So, one of the main reasons for creating such ghost towns is financial.
Another reason for creating a ghost town is a natural disaster. It could be related to floods, landslides, or earthquakes. Once the residents face such natural disasters, it is impossible to rebuild their lives there and continue living. Unsafety and the perils of these natural disasters striking again are the reasons for these towns becoming ghost towns.
Another reason for a ghost town could be the presence of a nuclear power plant. One such example is the Chornobyl disaster. Because of an accident near the nuclear power plant, radiation was released into the air, the residents had to be evacuated, and the town was abandoned. The accident marked the end of life in the town, and with all the residents gone, the town became another ghost town.
