Yumen Ghost Town in Jiayuguan Shi, China
Located in China‘s northwestern badlands near the edge of Gobi Desert, Yumen was once a buzzing oil city with a peak population of 300,000. However, as oil output plummeted, the old residential district became abandoned and now is a rare example of China’s true ghost towns. The town’s history dates back to the early 20th-century, when the Kuomintang regime dispatched a group of geologists to China’s barren northwest to prospect for oil. In 1939, oil was discovered in Yumen. The first oil...
















