On China’s Shengshan Island, an abandoned fishing village has slowly disappeared beneath a blanket of vines, greenery and mist. Houses that once sheltered thousands now stand largely empty, their walls covered by vegetation and their windows left open to the elements. This is Houtouwan, a village once home to more than 2,000 people. When the news agency AP reported from the village in 2018, only a handful of residents remained. Known as "Little Taiwan" at one point, Houtouwan was once a thriving fishing village and considered to be very prosperous in the 1970s and 1980s, according to Markus Müller Travel Blog.
The abandoned settlement, 40 miles away from Shanghai, had become a tourist destination, with hundreds of visitors walking its narrow and often muddy footpaths past crumbling, vegetation-covered houses to see homes overtaken by nature and understand what happened to the community that once lived there.
