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This book is an album of pictures and stories from abandoned locations, collected from over 3 years of exploring in China from 2018 to 2021. I visited almost every Chinese province from Inner Mongolia in the North to Yunnan in the South with over 100 cities, towns and villages in-between. Even if I did want to tell you about them, I could hardly remember all the names. My experience was positive…but there’re always exceptions.

As an urban explorer it’s almost impossible not to get yourself in trouble. I was arrested, chased by the dogs, chased by security-guards and interrogated for over ten hours when I was mistaken for a spy! I jumped fences, clambered onto abandoned ships, climbed walls (and many times fell off them) and walked along the ancient track of an old rollercoaster. I’ve been bruised, bloodied and almost broken more than a few bones. I flew my drone over beautiful vistas, I took photographs of modern ruins, all as I explored forbidden, forgotten, beautiful places.

In the end, it was all worth it, and I’d do it again knowing all of what would happen in a heartbeat. Even for an experienced explorer like myself however, China represented a unique challenge. Being a foreigner and living in China, it is rather difficult to research information about locations. I was lucky with some and unlucky with others. In this book I picked my favorite and most memorable places and I divided them into different sections (power plants, ships, planes, trains, hospitals, schools, hotels, theatres, movie sets, ghost towns and many more).

I hope this book changes your perspective on Urban Exploration, and maybe makes you consider the joy in impermanence. What we think of as immutable and eternal in our daily lives may one day be broken down and forgotten, but it still carries the scars and the reminders of the good and the bad that took place there.

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