Johannes Leistner

imagine your city council would decide to rebuild the old part of your town and they would kindly ask you to move to the suburbs as your house was in the way of the new/old city wall – what would you think?

For Datong’s residents this became reality. Datong is reconstructing their ancient city centre as it was (more or less) during the Ming Dynasty. This $8.5 billion project will turn Datong into a Disneyland-style city with 40.000 residents moving away from the centre.

I wouldn’t believe such a story if I haven’t seen it with my own eyes. If you only think about the reconstruction of the city wall (see picture) this is already a massive project. The wall is 5 kilometres long, around 12 metres wide and 10 metres high (at least). Every few 100-metres is featured with a watch tower and not to forget the huge moat, surrounding the wall…

here you can see a part of Datong which happens to be inside the recently built city wall – yes you heard it right: they rebuild their ancient city wall in its old dimensions (more photos to follow tomorrow). part of this gigantic project is to break down all (!) buildings of younger age in the city centre and rebuild them the old style. all residents will have to move to areas like this one: Datong housing project