The £78.9bn ghost city with deserted beach and empty shopping centre

It was supposed to be the £78.9 billion jewel in the crown of a Southeast Asian country’s housing development but ended up a ghost town as the Chinese property bubble burst.

Forest City, in Johor, Malaysia, was lauded in 2016 to become a home for more than 700,000 residents living in ultra-modern high-rise apartments, but has only ever welcomed around 9,000 people.

A huge shopping centre attached to the miniature metropolis is virtually empty as shops struggle to find a market with a population more like a village than a city.

Conceived in 2006 the project was to be overseen by massive Chinese building company Country Garden which after the housing market crash in China reported debts of over £200 billion.

According to the BBC the firm was still “optimistic” Forest City would bloom into a functioning development.

But one of the few local residents, Joanne Kaur, told the channel in 2023: “This place is eerie, even during the day, when you step out of your front door the corridor is dark.”

The influx of residents was heavily affected by the Covid pandemic, the consequences of which were felt in China more severely and for longer than many other parts of the world.

Foreign Policy Magazine reported last month the tower blocks and roads and gardens of the purpose-built city still seemed “empty”

The magazine said one prospective buyer from the United States as said “I’d only be able to rent it (an apartment) out for one or two months a year”. The man added “When I visited in 2018 this place was packed. Now there’s no one here. It’s like it’s haunted.”

When Forest City was first announced it was billed as a 20-year investment opportunity under China’s so-called Belt and Road Initiative where the superpower invests in infrastructure projects around the globe.

As well as suffering from a lack of residents the project has also been criticised for the environmental impact as much of the land Forest City has been built on has been reclaimed from vital wetlands on the Malaysian coast.