The Water Seller and the Tourists Who Photograph Her House
At the entrance to the Houtouwan viewing platform, a woman sits on a plastic stool behind a cardboard box stacked with bottled water. She is elderly, weathered by decades of East China Sea wind, and she charges five yuan per bottle. Behind her, a line of tourists from Shanghai — sneakers, sun hats, telephoto lenses — pay 50 yuan each for a ticket to walk through the ruins below. Some of them will photograph the third house down the slope, the one with the collapsed balcony and the vines pouring from every window like green curtains. That house was hers.
She cannot go inside anymore. The walls are intact only because the ivy holds them together; the structural load has shifted from brick to root. The furniture she left behind in 2002 — a wooden table, a cabinet, a television that received two channels on clear days — is still inside, draped in a living shroud of green. She knows this because she has looked through the doorway. She has not crossed the threshold. There is nothing to go back to, and too much to fall through.
Houtouwan was not destroyed by disaster, war, or government decree. It was killed by a harbor that was ten meters too shallow. The village is a monument to the tyranny of logistics — what happens when the geography that created a community’s wealth becomes the geography that makes it obsolete. China’s coastal urbanization did not attack Houtouwan. It simply moved on, the way a tide moves on from a rock pool, and the life that had gathered there dried up and blew away. The vines arrived afterward, filling the space where people used to be, growing into the shapes of rooms and corridors and doorways as if trying to remember what a village felt like.
Why Houtouwan Was One of China’s Wealthiest Fishing Villages
Shengshan Island and the Geography of the Zhoushan Archipelago
Shengshan Island sits at the eastern edge of the Shengsi Archipelago, a chain of roughly 400 islands scattered across the mouth of the Yangtze River where it empties into the East China Sea. The archipelago belongs to the broader Zhoushan group, itself part of Zhejiang Province. Shanghai is 64 kilometers to the northwest — close enough to see on a map, far enough to feel like another country.
Shengshan is the easternmost inhabited island in the chain. Beyond its cliffs, there is nothing but open ocean stretching toward Japan. The island is not flat; it is a jagged spine of rock rising steeply from the water, and the village of Houtouwan was built into its northern face, clinging to a slope so steep that the streets are not roads but staircases. The harbor below is a shallow, crescent-shaped bay — adequate for the wooden fishing boats of the mid-twentieth century, catastrophically inadequate for the steel-hulled trawlers that would replace them.
The waters surrounding Shengshan are among the richest fishing grounds in China. The collision of the cold Kuroshio Current with the nutrient-laden outflow of the Yangtze creates a zone of extraordinary marine productivity. For centuries, these waters fed the coastal populations of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. Houtouwan existed because of this biological accident — a village positioned at the edge of the continent, facing one of the most productive patches of ocean on Earth.
“Little Taiwan”: The 1950s–1980s Golden Age of Houtouwan
The village was established in the 1950s as part of China’s postwar effort to develop its coastal fishing capacity. Families from the mainland settled on the northern slope of Shengshan, building homes from reinforced brick and concrete — materials hauled up the steep paths by hand and mule. The architecture that survives today tells the story of prosperity, not poverty. These were not shacks. They were multi-story houses with courtyards, tiled facades, and balconies overlooking the harbor. Some had decorative ironwork. Many had separate kitchens and storage rooms for drying fish.
By the 1980s, Houtouwan’s population exceeded 2,000. The village earned the local nickname “Little Taiwan” — a reference to its relative wealth in a region where most island communities lived at subsistence level. The harbor was packed with wooden trawlers. The narrow staircases were clogged with fishermen hauling nets, women sorting the catch, children navigating the vertical labyrinth of their hometown. The air smelled of drying fish, diesel fuel, and salt. The economy was simple and effective: the sea provided, the village processed, and the money was reinvested into the houses that climbed the hill.
The prosperity was real, but it was entirely dependent on two conditions that seemed permanent and were not: abundant fish in the surrounding waters, and a harbor deep enough to accommodate the boats that caught them.
Why Was Houtouwan Abandoned? The Logistics of a Village That Couldn’t Adapt
The Shallow Harbor and the Rise of Deep-Water Trawlers
The fishing industry along China’s eastern seaboard underwent a transformation in the 1990s that Houtouwan could not survive. The small wooden boats that had sustained the village for decades were being replaced by larger, steel-hulled commercial trawlers capable of operating in deeper waters and carrying far greater tonnages of catch. These new vessels required deep-water ports with proper docking infrastructure — concrete quays, fuel depots, ice plants, refrigeration.
Houtouwan’s crescent bay offered none of this. The harbor was shallow, exposed to northerly swells, and accessible only to boats with a shallow draft. The new trawlers could not dock there. Fishermen who wanted to continue working had to relocate to ports on the western side of Shengshan or to Gouqi Island, connected by the Sanjiaojiang Bridge. The commute was possible but punishing — and it severed the connection between home and livelihood that had defined the village for forty years.
The fish themselves were also becoming scarcer. Decades of industrial-scale harvesting along the Yangtze estuary had depleted stocks that once seemed inexhaustible. The catch that had made Houtouwan wealthy was shrinking, and the boats capable of reaching the remaining stocks were too large to come home. Craco, the medieval Italian ghost town sliding off a ridge in Basilicata, died from a similar betrayal — geography that had once provided safety becoming the very thing that made modern life impossible. Houtouwan’s version of the same story played out faster and with less drama: no landslides, no earthquakes, just a harbor that was the wrong shape for the century it found itself in.
The Last Families to Leave Houtouwan
The depopulation was not a sudden evacuation. There was no single event, no government order, no catastrophe that emptied the streets. It was a slow hemorrhage that spanned the 1990s, one family at a time.
The school was the first institution to fail. Teachers could not be recruited to live on a remote island accessible only by hours of rough ferry travel, and parents who wanted their children educated had no choice but to relocate to the mainland or to more accessible towns on the western islands. Education was the tripwire: once the school closed, the families with children left, and once the families left, the shops and services that depended on them closed too.
Everything in Houtouwan required physical labor that the modern world had eliminated elsewhere. Fresh water, rice, cooking gas, furniture — all of it had to be carried up stone staircases by hand. There were no roads for delivery trucks. There was no vehicle access of any kind. As living standards rose across coastal China in the 1990s and early 2000s, the gap between life in Houtouwan and life on the mainland widened from inconvenience to impossibility.
By 2002, the village was officially depopulated. The last residents — mostly elderly people who had spent their entire lives on the slope — were relocated to nearby communities. Many left their doors unlocked. They left furniture, kitchenware, photographs on walls, televisions that no longer received a signal. The objects that were too heavy to carry down the staircases stayed behind, and over the following years, the vines grew over them, around them, and through them. The village was not looted. It was simply surrendered, house by house, to the humidity and the green.
How Nature Reclaimed Houtouwan in 20 Years
Parthenocissus tricuspidata and the Biology of the Green Wave
The architect of Houtouwan’s transformation is a specific plant: Parthenocissus tricuspidata, commonly known as Boston ivy or Japanese creeper. The vine is native to East Asia and thrives in exactly the conditions Shengshan Island provides — high humidity, frequent rainfall, mild winters, and abundant vertical surfaces to climb.
The species possesses adhesive pads at the tips of its tendrils that bond to almost any surface: brick, concrete, glass, wood, rusted metal. Once established, it grows rapidly — up to a meter per year in favorable conditions — and its coverage is total. The vine does not merely decorate a wall; it seals it. Leaves overlap in dense, shingle-like layers that block light, trap moisture, and create a microclimate between the vine and the substrate. In Houtouwan, the ivy did not simply cover the buildings. It replaced them as the dominant structural element. Walls that have lost their mortar to decades of salt air and rain remain standing only because the root network holds the bricks in place.
The subtropical climate of the East China Sea coast accelerated the process. Shengshan receives over 1,200 millimeters of rainfall annually. The sea mist that rolls in from the north coats every surface in salt and moisture. In a temperate, dry climate, abandonment produces dust and slow decay. In Houtouwan’s wet, warm environment, abandonment produced an explosion of biological growth that covered the village within a decade.
What Houtouwan Looks Like Today — Inside the Vine-Covered Ruins
The descent into Houtouwan begins at the viewing platform on the upper ridge. From above, the village does not immediately register as a ruin. The eye sees a hillside of unbroken green cascading toward the sea — dense, electric, almost manicured in its uniformity. The optical illusion holds for a moment. Then the geometry emerges: right angles beneath the foliage, the rectangles of windows, the hard edges of rooflines softened but not erased by the covering of leaves. The “hills” have walls. The “mounds” have doorways.
The hiking trail descends through the village on maintained stone paths, slippery with moss and algae even in dry weather. The air is heavy and damp, carrying the smell of wet earth, decaying wood, and the faint brine of the ocean below. The silence is the first thing visitors report — not the silence of emptiness but the silence of dense vegetation, a muffled, greenhouse quiet where the wind is filtered through millions of leaves before it reaches the ear.
The houses are sealed by vines but not always impenetrable. Through doorways where the growth is thinner, visitors can see interiors frozen in the early 2000s: wooden furniture draped in green, walls streaked with water damage, floors thick with leaf litter. The buildings are structurally unsound — roofs have collapsed, floors have given way, staircases lead to rooms that no longer exist. Warning signs are posted on almost every entrance. The beauty of the exterior conceals a ruin that is actively decomposing, one rainy season at a time.
The comparison to Pripyat is inevitable but imprecise. Both are abandoned settlements where nature has reclaimed human infrastructure. Pripyat was evacuated in hours by a nuclear disaster and preserved by radiation and cold; Houtouwan was emptied over a decade by economics and covered by a subtropical vine. Pripyat is grey and frozen; Houtouwan is green and growing. The emotional register is different: Pripyat induces dread, Houtouwan induces something closer to vertigo — the disorientation of watching a human settlement being slowly, beautifully digested by the earth.
How Houtouwan Went Viral and Became a Tourist Destination
The 2015 Weibo Photographs and the Tourism Flood
For roughly thirteen years after its depopulation, Houtouwan sat in near-total obscurity. A few urban explorers and local photographers visited, but the village was unknown outside the Zhoushan Archipelago. That changed in 2015, when a series of aerial and ground-level photographs of the vine-covered ruins went viral on Weibo, China’s dominant social media platform. The images were stunning — a ghost village that looked like a lost civilization, hidden in the mists of the East China Sea.
Western media picked up the story within weeks. CNN, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and the Daily Mail all published features. The village was christened the “Wizard of Oz” village and “the most beautiful abandoned village in the world.” The local government of Shengshan, initially overwhelmed, scrambled to respond. Chen Bo, a Shengshan Island official, issued a public statement that captured the panic: the island’s telephone lines were jammed, tourists were arriving at the ferry terminal demanding to see the “green village,” and the site had no infrastructure to receive them. “Houtouwan of Shengshan hasn’t been equipped with the conditions to open to tourists,” Chen said. “We urge visitors to preserve its tranquility for now.”
The tourists came anyway. In the early months, they wandered freely into the rotting houses, climbing unstable staircases and standing on roofs held up by nothing but vine roots. The village that had been abandoned because it was too remote was suddenly too accessible.
Houtouwan Tourism Today: 90,000 Visitors and a Village That Can’t Decide What It Is
The Shengshan government spent two years building tourism infrastructure before formally opening the site in 2017. A viewing platform on the upper ridge offers the panoramic “drone view” of the entire village for approximately 20 RMB (roughly $3 USD). A hiking trail through the village itself costs 50–60 RMB ($8 USD) and is maintained with paved boardwalks, safety railings, and “Keep Out” signs on every doorway.
By 2021, Houtouwan was receiving 90,000 visitors annually, generating 3.3 million RMB ($470,000) for the island’s economy. The village that could not sustain 2,000 residents now sustains an economy built on their absence.
The most disorienting detail is the former residents who have returned — not to live, but to sell. Elderly men and women who grew up in Houtouwan now sit at the trailhead and along the hiking route, selling bottled water and snacks to tourists who have paid to photograph their former homes. The transaction is strange and irreducible: the person who built the house sells water to the person who photographs it. The vine that killed the village created the attraction that feeds its survivors.
The tension between preservation and exploitation is unresolved. Ordos Kangbashi, China’s other famous ghost city, was built for a population that never arrived — an emptiness of anticipation. Houtouwan is the opposite: an emptiness of departure, where the population was real, the prosperity was real, and the loss is visible in every vine-covered window. The question of what the site owes to the people who left it — and what it owes to the plants that replaced them — has no comfortable answer.
Visiting Houtouwan — The Atlas Entry
Reaching Houtouwan requires commitment. From Shanghai, the journey begins at the Nanpu Bridge Bus Station, where combined bus-and-ferry tickets are available. A bus crosses the Donghai Bridge — one of the longest sea bridges in the world — to Shengjiawan Port or Yangshan Deep Water Port, a journey of approximately two hours. From the port, a ferry crosses to Gouqi Island, which is connected to Shengshan Island by the Sanjiaojiang Bridge. The fast ferry takes roughly 90 minutes; the slow ferry takes three to four hours. From Gouqi, a taxi across the bridge delivers visitors to the Houtouwan trailhead. Total travel time from Shanghai: five to seven hours, depending on ferry schedules and connections.
Ferries are weather-dependent. In typhoon season (July through September), cancellations are frequent and sometimes last for days. Ferry schedules should be confirmed the day before departure. Accommodation is available on Gouqi Island, which has guesthouses, seafood restaurants, and a growing bed-and-breakfast scene — Houtouwan itself has no lodging, no shops, and no services beyond the ticket office and water sellers at the trailhead.
The best time to visit is summer, when the vines are at their most vivid green and the village achieves the saturated, almost neon appearance that made it famous. Spring brings heavy fog that can obscure the view from the platform but adds a haunting, grey-green atmosphere at ground level. Winter strips some of the foliage and reveals more of the underlying architecture — a different kind of beauty, skeletal rather than lush.
Visitors should bring insect repellent (the mosquitoes are aggressive and constant), sturdy shoes with grip (the moss-covered paths are treacherous even when dry), and water — though the former residents will happily sell it at the entrance. The maximum duration of a visit through the hiking trail is roughly two hours. The viewing platform requires less than thirty minutes.
Houtouwan is best paired with time on Gouqi Island itself, which offers beaches, mussel farms, and some of the best seafood in eastern China. The contrast is the point: an hour’s taxi ride separates a village that was devoured by the sea of green from an island community that is still very much alive, its harbor full of boats, its restaurants full of noise.
Standing on the lower path, looking back up at the village from the harbor, the green wall of vine-covered houses rises like a wave frozen mid-crash. Somewhere inside that wave is a wooden table, a cabinet, a television that received two channels. The family that owned them is selling water at the top of the hill. The vines do not care about any of this. They only know how to grow.
FAQ
What is Houtouwan and why was it abandoned?
Houtouwan is an abandoned fishing village on the northern face of Shengshan Island, part of the Shengsi Archipelago in China’s Zhejiang Province, approximately 64 kilometers east of Shanghai. The village was established in the 1950s and reached a peak population of over 2,000 residents in the 1980s. Depopulation began in the 1990s as China’s fishing fleet modernized — the village’s shallow harbor could not accommodate the larger steel-hulled trawlers that replaced wooden boats. The lack of vehicle access, educational facilities, and reliable supply routes accelerated the decline. By 2002, the village was completely depopulated.
What is the green vine that covers the buildings in Houtouwan?
The dominant species is Parthenocissus tricuspidata, commonly known as Boston ivy or Japanese creeper. Native to East Asia, the vine uses adhesive pads to bond to surfaces including brick, concrete, and glass. It grows up to a meter per year in the subtropical conditions of Shengshan Island — high humidity, frequent rain, and mild winters. The vine covered the village within roughly a decade of abandonment, creating the distinctive “green wave” appearance that made the site internationally famous.
How do I get to Houtouwan from Shanghai?
The journey takes five to seven hours and involves multiple stages. Take a bus from Shanghai’s Nanpu Bridge Bus Station to Shengjiawan Port or Yangshan Deep Water Port (approximately two hours), then a ferry to Gouqi Island (90 minutes by fast ferry, 3–4 hours by slow ferry). From Gouqi, a taxi crosses the Sanjiaojiang Bridge to Shengshan Island and the Houtouwan trailhead. Ferries are weather-dependent and frequently cancelled during typhoon season (July–September). Confirm schedules the day before travel.
Is it safe to enter the abandoned houses in Houtouwan?
Visitors are strongly advised against entering any of the buildings. The houses are structurally unsound — roofs have collapsed, floors have deteriorated, and walls in many cases are held in place only by vine root systems rather than mortar. Warning signs are posted on doorways throughout the village. The maintained hiking trail and viewing platform provide extensive access to the site without requiring entry into the structures.
When did Houtouwan become famous and how many tourists visit?
The village gained international attention in 2015 when photographs of the vine-covered ruins went viral on Weibo, China’s dominant social media platform. Western media outlets including CNN, National Geographic, and The Atlantic subsequently published features. The Shengshan government opened the site to organized tourism in 2017, installing a viewing platform and hiking trail. By 2021, Houtouwan was receiving approximately 90,000 visitors annually, generating 3.3 million RMB (approximately $470,000) for the island’s economy.
What is the best time of year to visit Houtouwan?
Summer (June–August) offers the most vivid green coverage and the classic appearance that made the village famous. Spring brings atmospheric fog that adds a haunting quality but can obscure views from the upper platform. Winter strips some foliage and reveals more architectural detail. Typhoon season (July–September) carries a high risk of ferry cancellations. Visitors should bring insect repellent (mosquitoes are aggressive year-round), sturdy shoes with grip for the moss-covered paths, and their own water supply, though bottled water is available at the trailhead.
Sources
- Houtouwan, China’s Ghost Village Swallowed by Nature - CNN Travel (2022)
- Visit Plant-Infested Houtouwan, a Chinese Ex-Fishing Village - National Geographic Travel (2021)
- Houtouwan in Shengshan Island - Atlas Obscura (ongoing)
- An Abandoned Fishing Village in China May Just Be the ‘Greenest Village in the World’ Today - Islands Magazine (2025)
- Houtouwan Village Has Become Almost Entirely Consumed By Nature - Abandoned Spaces (2023)
- Abandoned Village Houtouwan in China - Markus Müller Travel (2024)
- Houtouwan: An Abandoned Fishing Village in China - World Abandoned (2024)
- Shengsi County Tourism Statistics: Houtouwan Visitor Data 2021 - Local News Reports via CNN Travel (2022)
- Parthenocissus tricuspidata: Growth Habits and Distribution - Flora of China / eFloras.org (Missouri Botanical Garden)
- Shengsi Archipelago: National Scenic Area Designation - Zhejiang Provincial Tourism Commission
