Houtouwan Village

On the north shore of Shengshan, one of the outer islands of the Shengsi archipelago where the Yangtze estuary opens into the East China Sea, a whole fishing village has been taken back by plants. Houtouwan climbs a steep cove in terraces of houses, and almost every wall, roof and stairway is now wrapped in a continuous coat of creepers. From the road above, the settlement reads less like a ruin than like a green relief carved into the hillside, with window openings and doorways showing through the leaves as dark squares.

The village is young by the standards of abandoned places. It grew up in the 1950s and at its height held more than two thousand fishermen and around five hundred homes packed tightly into the cove. From the 1990s the island's isolation began to tell: schooling, supplies and work were all on the mainland, and families left one by one for Shanghai and the coast. Only a handful of people were still there by 1994, and by 2002 Houtouwan was effectively empty, leaving a few residents behind in later years.

What makes the place remarkable is the speed and completeness of the takeover. In less than two decades the vegetation has smoothed the village into a single living surface, so that the eye picks out architecture by its shadows: a staircase under a green tunnel, a courtyard wall gone soft, a roofline drowned in foliage. Photographs of it circulated widely in the mid-2010s, and the village was later opened to paying visitors, with former residents returning each day to work there. The best views are from the viewpoints on the road above the cove, where the whole amphitheatre of houses can be seen falling towards the sea.

Getting there

Houtouwan lies on Shengshan Island, which is joined by a bridge to neighbouring Gouqi Island. The nominal nearest town, Shenjiamen on the main Zhoushan island, is about 99 km away by straight line, and Zhoushan Putuoshan International Airport (HSN) is about 98 km away, but in practice the trip starts in Shanghai. Combined bus-and-ferry services leave from Shanghai's Nanpu Bridge bus station for the port area at Yangshan, with ferries onwards into the Shengsi islands and a connection to Gouqi and Shengshan; the journey takes most of a day, and visitors usually plan at least two days. From the pier a taxi covers the last stretch, and the village is a short walk from the road.