Chinese fishing village slowly swallowed by nature 20 years after being abandoned
Welcome to Houtouwan, an abandoned fishing village in China that has been reclaimed by nature.
Located on Shengshan Island, one of 400 islands near Shanghai, China, Houtouwan used to be home to roughly 3000 people.
But after a mass exodus in the 90s, only five permanent residents remain.
Once thriving on a steady supply of fish, the abundance of food didn’t last forever.
In the 90s, fishermen’s hauls were becoming smaller and smaller.
Then, China imposed seasonal moratoriums on fishing operations in the late 1990s to protect fish stocks from further depletion.
It devastated the village’s major industries.
Sun Ayue, a 62-year old former fisherman who still lives in the village, said the 600 or so families living in Houtouwan eventually left.
The village was isolated, roads were poor and teachers found it too difficult to travel into Houtouwan to educate the children.
“Transportation was inconvenient,” he said.
“It was too far away.
“They arrived in the dark and left in the dark.”
As we learned from a yarn from Maggie Hiufu Wong for CNN, the village was officially “depopulated” in 2002.
It meant the lone residents such as Sun now plenty of space for their veggie gardens, but earned the village a rep as a ghost town.
But thanks to the beautiful green vines slowly taking over the town, it has taken on a new life as a tourist hotspot.
Now, keen travellers trek to the remote village for the perfect photos of a village that nature took over.