I grew up inland. Hubei province, on a bend of the Yangtze, about nine hundred kilometres from the coast. The sea reached me in two forms as a child: on television, and in the coarse grey salt my mother kept in a jar beside the stove. I was grown before I saw it with my own eyes. I was older still before I lived next to it.
Before that I had spent years in offices, in a few different cities, the last of them in Beijing — desk, monitor, meetings, the 8:20 a.m. subway out and the 7:40 p.m. one back. In the autumn of 2022 I resigned. I had no plan for what came next, only a decision about what it would not be: it would not be another desk.
What I had was a savings account, and a small income from things I posted online — videos, mostly, and some writing. What I did not have was a salary, and I did not intend to look for one. That single fact decided almost everything else. Once there is no monthly wage arriving, the cost of a place stops being a detail and becomes the whole design.
So the arithmetic came first, and I did it the way you do arithmetic, on the back of an envelope.
In Beijing and Shanghai, a decent one-bedroom flat rented for 6,000 to 8,000 yuan a month (roughly $835 to $1,110). That is 72,000 to 96,000 yuan a year — about $10,000 to $13,300 — spent on nothing but a roof and the right to sleep under it. If that was the entry fee, I was not going to get through the door. Anything I earned from posting videos would have gone into the landlord’s pocket, and I would have been back to needing a job within a year.
There was a second number in my head, from a news story a few years earlier. In 2019 the coal city of Hegang, up in Heilongjiang at the far northeast corner of China, became famous for apartments selling for 20,000 to 30,000 yuan (about $2,800 to $4,200) — the price of a used car. Hegang was a real city with a shrinking population and a housing stock built for a boom that had already ended. People wrote about it as a curiosity, and as a warning to small cities everywhere. I read those pieces and thought: this is a place where the rent is not the problem.
I wrote a list. It had three items on it, and depending on the day, any one of them could be at the top.
The first was the sea. I had grown up on a river — wide, brown in summer, and nothing like the ocean — and I had spent my adult life in cities with no water in them at all. I wanted to be able to walk to the sea. Not to visit it, not to retire to it later. To live beside it, with a window that faced it.
The second was cost. Cheap enough that stopping work was not a slow suicide.
The third was quiet. I am not good in crowds. I never have been. It is not a philosophical position; it is closer to a physical one, like a low tolerance for noise. A place I could afford that was also loud would have solved nothing.
Notice what is not on the list: jobs, schools, hospitals, transport, friends. I was young, single, and not planning to be any different. I did not need a labour market or a kindergarten. That narrowed the search enormously, and it is the reason the answer to this chapter is a ghost town and not a city.
I started with Qingdao, because Qingdao is the obvious answer.
Qingdao is a real city on the south coast of the Shandong peninsula: ten million people, a German-built old town, beer, a coastline with actual beaches, an airport, a metro. If you want to live by the sea in northern China and you are not rich, Qingdao is the name that comes up first. I went. I walked the coast for a few days, from the old town out to the newer districts, and looked at what a person could rent there.
The sea was real and it was priced accordingly. Everything within walking distance of the water cost city money. Move inland far enough to find something cheap, and the sea stopped being something you could walk to — it became something you took a bus to on a Sunday. I had made the sea the first item on the list precisely so that it would not be a weekend trip. In Qingdao, on my budget, it would have been a weekend trip.
I also understood, standing on the promenade and looking at the crowds, that I had made an error in the design of the search. I had been treating “by the sea” as one thing. It is at least two. There is a coast where eight million people also want to be, and a coast where they do not.
So I went further east. Weihai.
Weihai sits at the northeastern tip of the peninsula, a prefecture-level city, smaller than Qingdao by a factor of three or four, cleaner, colder, and more orderly — a place with a naval history and a reputation for tidiness. It was better. It was also still a city with a city’s prices near the water, and the cheap districts were, again, away from the sea. I spent three days there on that first trip, walking, taking the bus out along the coast, eating in small places, doing the only calculation that mattered to me: how much of this could I see from a window I could afford.
Weihai is a good city. I want to be accurate about that. It was not too big or too loud. It was simply that the arithmetic did not close. In Weihai I would have needed income, and not a small amount of it, and needing income meant needing work, and needing work meant the whole point of resigning had been thrown away.
Then Rongcheng, which is not a city in the way Qingdao is a city. It is a county-level city under Weihai, at the very eastern end of the peninsula — the next landmass east of it is Korea. Fishing, kelp, a port, a scenic headland where tour buses stop. The rents dropped here. This was the first place on the trip where I felt the number getting close to something I could live on.
What stopped me was not the price. It was that Rongcheng is a working town. It has its own economy, its own fishermen, its own markets, its own people who were born there and will die there. There was nothing wrong with it — but it was full. I had gone looking for the sea and for cheap and for quiet, and Rongcheng was cheap for the ordinary reason that it was small and far away, not for the interesting reason that nobody wanted it.
I did not know yet that I was looking for the interesting reason. I found that out the next time I went west.
Rushan.
Rushan is also a county-level city under Weihai, but it sits on the south coast of the peninsula, an hour or so west of Weihai city by road, facing the Yellow Sea across open water. It is not a famous place. There is no reason a foreign reader would have heard of it, and not much reason a Chinese reader outside Shandong would have either. It is known, locally, for two things: a type of oyster, and a stretch of coast called Silver Beach — Yintan — that the local government began developing as a seaside resort in the 1990s and never stopped.
The development took the form of residential compounds. Not hotels; apartments. Compound after compound of them, built along a flat strip of coast, most of them six to eleven storeys, all of them pale beige and white and terracotta, all of them with the same balconies in the same rows and the same air-conditioning brackets bolted to the same walls. The idea was that people from the inland cities — Jinan, Zhengzhou, Taiyuan — would buy a second flat by the sea, come for the summer, and that this would go on for thirty years.
There are about two hundred of these compounds along that strip. A rough guess at the total number of flats is in the hundreds of thousands. A rough guess at the number of people living in them in the winter is very much smaller, and the gap between those two numbers is the entire story of this book.
I found Silver Beach the way you find anything now: on a phone, at night, scrolling listings. The number that stopped me was a year’s rent quoted at 3,000 yuan — about $420. Not a month. A year. I read it twice, then looked at other listings to see whether it was a typo or a scam. It was neither. There were dozens of them, in the same range, all along the same coast.
That was the moment the search ended. I had spent the second half of 2022 walking coastlines from Qingdao eastward looking for a place I could afford to stop working in, and the answer was a resort strip that had been built for a crowd that never turned up.
I took the high-speed train to Weihai, spent three days there sorting out what needed sorting out, and then took the coach — the local intercity bus that runs the coast road. It got in during the afternoon of 26 October 2022. I had one suitcase and a backpack. The flat was on the fourth floor of a seven-storey walk-up — no lift — in a compound about ten minutes’ walk from the water, and it had been furnished by someone who had furnished it for a summer they never spent there: a bed, a sofa, a table, a fridge, a washing machine, an air conditioner, and a set of curtains that were slightly too short.
I had asked for a walk-up, and I was glad of it. I do not like tall buildings. In the city, a tall building meant a corridor with no daylight in it, a window that looked straight into another window, and a flat where the sun reached in for an hour or two a day, if the weather was clear. The blocks were packed close enough that most windows showed you nothing but the wall of the next one. You could not see the sky, or the moon, or a single star. To me those rows of towers never looked much like housing; they looked like pigeon cages stacked and identical, one on top of another. And a lift I dislike more than any of it — a windowless steel box that closes on you and moves, which is the nearest thing to being sealed into a coffin that a person does to himself several times a day without thinking. Somewhere in my last years in Beijing I stopped wanting any part of it. So when I looked at listings here I picked out the old blocks, the ones with stairs. The flat I took is on the fourth floor of seven. Four flights, a window on every landing. I have not once wished for a lift.
I want to give the reader the correct picture of what I walked into, because “ghost town” is a phrase that gets used loosely, and people hear it and picture ruins.
There are no ruins. The buildings are new and in good repair. The roads are paved, the streetlights work, the bins get emptied, the pavements are clean and the grass is cut. The compound has a gate, a security booth, a bicycle shed, and a small office, and the stairwell in my building is swept and lit. Nothing is broken. Nothing is abandoned. It is not a ruin; it is a finished thing with nobody in it.
At night the streetlights come on, and the lamps are the only light.
Standing on my balcony after dark in the first weeks, I could see four of those compounds from where I stood, and between them something like a hundred windows facing me. In the winter of 2022 the number of those windows with a light in them could be counted on one hand, and on most nights it was zero or one. Not “few”. Zero or one. The buildings were not shut down or boarded up. They were simply dark, floor after floor, the way an office building is dark on a Sunday, except that this was Sunday and Monday and Tuesday and every other day.
The streets were the same. There is a main road through the resort strip, wide, with four lanes and a centre line and traffic lights at the junctions, and on a winter evening you could walk down the middle of it. Not on the pavement — down the middle. I did that more than once, in the first weeks, mostly to see whether anyone would honk at me. Nobody did, because there was nobody. The traffic lights changed for empty road.
The beach was the same. Silver Beach is a long, flat, pale, gently shelving beach — good for swimming in the summer, which is why they built the resort — and it runs for kilometres. In winter there are people on it, occasionally. A few. Walking a dog, or digging for clams at low tide with a bucket and a screwdriver. I once walked forty minutes along the waterline without passing anyone at all, which is a thing that does not happen on any beach in any country I have been to.
And the people who were here were old.
That is the demographic fact of the ghost town, and it took me a while to see how total it was. Rushan Silver Beach is not empty; it is age-selective. The permanent population is retirees — people in their sixties and seventies who bought a cheap flat by the sea a decade or more ago and moved here for the air, or for their blood pressure, or because a doctor told them to. They are here in winter. They are the ones in the lit windows. They are the ones who fill the small market in the morning.
Of the people under forty, in my first winter, I could count them on one hand. Of women under thirty, in the first six months, I genuinely do not remember seeing one. There is no exaggeration in that sentence and no point being made by it. It is just the arithmetic of who comes to live in a place with no jobs in it. Young people need work. There is no work here. Therefore there are no young people. Anyone who wants a hospital with specialists, a school, a boyfriend, a career, a cinema, a bar with a queue outside it — anyone with any of those requirements — has somewhere else to be, and they are there.
It is easier to list what Rushan Silver Beach does not have than what it does.
There is no shopping mall. There is no cinema. There is no department store, no chain bookstore, no fast-food restaurant — no McDonald’s, no KFC, no Pizza Hut, none of the brands that mark a place as being on the map. There are no bars, no nightclubs, no neon, no late-night anything. There is no traffic to speak of: no rush hour, no traffic jams, no honking. Food delivery either does not exist or may as well not, because there is nothing to order that is further than a five-minute walk. There is no chain coffee. There is no gym with machines in it, though there is an outdoor exercise ground with painted metal equipment, which the retirees use at six in the morning.
What there is: a fish market, a small supermarket, a handful of noodle and dumpling places, a few shops selling seashells and inflatable swim rings, a hardware stall, a post office, a bus stop, a bank branch that opens four days a week, and about two hundred compounds of flats.
It is a seaside town. It is a resort town. That phrase is accurate and it also explains the year.
For ten months of the year, Silver Beach is what I have described. For two months it is not. In July and August, when the schools are out and the water is warm enough to swim in — the Yellow Sea here is cold; it does not really get comfortable until mid-July — the owners come. They come from Jinan and Zhengzhou and Taiyuan and Beijing, in cars, with grandparents and children and coolers and beach umbrellas, and they open the flats that have been shut since September, and the compound car parks fill up, and the restaurants put tables outside, and the beach gets a crowd at sunset, and for six or eight weeks the place looks like what the developers promised in the brochure.
Then September comes, and the temperature drops, and the cars leave. You can watch it happen. The car parks empty over a week or so. The restaurants close and put up their shutters and tape a phone number to the door. The outdoor tables get stacked and carried inside. By mid-October the compound I live in is back down to a few windows lit, and by November the ones that are left are mostly over sixty.
Winter is when the place earns its name.
The coast here is a shallow bay open to the south, which means the wind comes in off the water with nothing in the way to slow it down. The temperature is not extreme by Chinese standards — across the four winters I have watched from here, the coldest nights have run around minus thirteen, minus twelve, minus ten Celsius — and there is no central heating, because Rushan is technically south of the line where the government supplies it, so the indoor temperature in January is about five or six degrees, which is colder than most people in northern China would tolerate and colder than it sounds. But the number is not the point. The point is that the cold arrives together with the emptiness.
In winter, at night, the wind comes off the sea and moves through the resort strip and there is nobody out in it. You walk to the water and the beach is black and there is one light somewhere along it, far away, and the wind, and the sand, and you. On those nights the streets are dark except for the streetlights, and the lit windows number in the single digits across an entire compound, and the four-lane road is empty the whole way down, and the whole thing — two hundred compounds of flats, kilometres of beach, a resort built for hundreds of thousands of people — is running for perhaps a few thousand of them, most of whom are asleep by nine.
That is the picture people mean when they say ghost town, and in winter the name is not a metaphor.
Chinese writers have a shorthand for places like this: the Hegang by the sea. Hegang is the coal city in the far northeast that became famous in 2019 for apartments selling for the price of a used car, and the phrase has since come to mean any town where housing is nearly free because nobody wants to live in it. Rushan Silver Beach has the same skeleton — a housing stock built for a population that did not arrive — with one difference: Hegang lost its industry and its people left. Here there was never any industry to lose. The flats were built for summer. The summer lasts eight weeks. The buildings last fifty years.
So: why would you go?
Two reasons, and I will give them in the order they apply to me.
The first is money. In a big city, a one-bedroom flat was 6,000 to 8,000 yuan a month (about $835 to $1,110), or 72,000 to 96,000 yuan a year. Here, my first year’s rent was 4,000 yuan — about $560 — for a furnished two-bedroom flat on the fourth floor of a walk-up, with a sea view from the balcony. Not a month. The year. My water bill runs on a rate of 3.05 yuan per ton, electricity at 0.555 yuan per unit, gas at 3.28 yuan per cubic metre, and the property management fee has been somewhere between 270 and 506 yuan a year, depending on the year and what the compound decides it needs. I have had a full year here in which everything — rent, food, utilities, transport, the lot — came to under 10,000 yuan, which is about $1,400. That year was not austere by local standards. It was just a year in a place where the biggest cost of living has been removed.
The second reason is quiet, and the quiet has the same cause as the emptiness, which is why the two cannot be separated. Nobody comes here. That is the flaw and it is also the product. I sleep eight or nine hours without waking. I hear the sea from my bed in winter when the wind is up, and on a still night I hear nothing at all, which took me about a month to get used to and which I now find difficult to give up. There is no queue at the market. The bus is never full. The beach on a Tuesday in March is mine.
What I gave up for it is also worth writing down plainly, so that no reader mistakes this chapter for a recommendation: I gave up the possibility of an ordinary social life, and I gave up the ordinary infrastructure of a city, and I did it while most people my age were busy building the opposite. The people I had known were all somewhere else. There is no one to have dinner with unless I cook it myself. That is the price, and I will come back to it in another chapter. It is not a small price. For me, at that point in my life, it was the cheaper of two options.
I arrived on 26 October 2022 and spent the first evening doing housework.
The flat had been shut up for the summer and it smelled of dust and salt. I swept it, wiped down the surfaces, found the water valve, worked out which switch did what. There was no food in the place, so at some point I went down to the small supermarket by the gate and bought rice, eggs, a bag of pickled vegetables and a bottle of soy sauce, which came to a little over twenty yuan.
After it got dark I walked down to the beach. I did not know the way yet and I went the long way round, past two compounds, down a road with streetlights and nothing else moving. The water was black and there was a light on it far out, probably a boat. I stood there for about twenty minutes. I heard the waves, and somewhere behind me a dog.
Then I walked back to the compound and up the four flights of stairs, and cooked rice for the first time in a kitchen that was mine, in a building where I was one of about four people, and ate it standing by the window looking at the dark.