If tycoon Yang Bin (
Bus No. 260 departs at regular intervals from outside the Intermediate People's Court in the northeastern city of Shenyang heading for Holland Village, a sprawling complex of apartment buildings, offices and greenhouses.
The side of the bus carries a large advertisement, still in bright colors, urging people to "Move to Holland Village" and showing the 219-hectare real estate development's hallmark Dutch windmills and Baroque castles.
No one has followed the advertisement's advice since Dutch-Chinese businessman Yang fell foul of the law in September last year, and many have moved out.
"There are only about 60 security guards left here," said one young guard dressed in a gray uniform. "No one else goes to work here anymore."
Attention this week is focused on Yang's trial, which is expected to end in a verdict today with a long jail sentence for the 40-year-old businessman.
But next on many creditors' list of priorities is the question of how to recoup some of the money they lent to Yang's collapsed empire.
Auctioning off Holland Village could play a key part in making them happy, sources following Yang's trial have said.
Yang was thinking big when he tried to fullfil his dream of bringing home a piece of the Netherlands, where he worked and studied and eventually obtained citizenship.
It was to have been a garden of peace and refined taste, where residents could relax behind guarded walls and forget they were in the middle of northeast China's dreary northeastern rustbelt.
In the spirit of a new China where young entrepreneurs were allowed to foster bold ideas and turn them into practice, Yang planned to invest 1.8 billion yuan (US$200 million) into a dream-like place where people could live and shop in luxurious surroundings.
Even in Yang's heyday, Holland Village never escaped looking slightly bizarre, resembling a kind of fairytale Netherlands thought up by an architect who appeared to know the country from coffeetable books.
And more than eight months after Yang was placed under house arrest suspected of financial irregularities, the luster of the project has faded fast.
Decrepit and depopulated, it now looks almost as eccentric as the idea of a North Korean capitalist trade zone that Pyongyang picked Yang to run in September last year, shortly before his detention by Chinese authorities.
A clock on a replica of Amsterdam train station in the center of the village has stopped at 3:15pm, and it seems time has stood still all around it.
The vast flowerbeds that once adorned the sides of the street have disappeared, as has the water in the moats, along with the black and white swans.
The broad avenue separating Holland Village in two is rapidly deteriorating into a dirt road, while grass sticks through cracks in the pavement.
Panes are missing in many of the windows of the two-storey buildings that should have housed cozy little shops, and banners that previously welcomed visitors are torn to shreds.
Apart from being the residence for Shenyang's wealthy classes, Holland Village was also to have served Yang's vast horticultural business.
Extended rows of oversized greenhouses were built in a corner of the complex, intended for mass production of orchids and chrysanthemums.
Now, the weeds in the ditches outside the greenhouses grow more plentiful than any of the flowers inside, left untended for months.
"There's no water and power supply except for in our living quarters," said a security guard.
Even if nothing else works in Holland Village, the security apparatus is apparetnly still up and running.
"No one is allowed to roam around here," said a plain-clothes police officer, stepping out of his four-wheel drive.
"No photos and no notes, please. That's an order from the city government," he said.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
RSS