In Medieval China a new emperor ascends the throne after the former emperor, his father, chokes to death on a chicken bone. The new emperor, Lu Huang Du, is pleased to hear rumours are spreading that he is responsible. After all, to be believed to have acquired the throne through luck rather than cunning would only make him look weak. So, to reinforce this false perception of ruthlessness the only thing to do is become ruthless – the idea preceding reality – by executing all who spread the rumour and to have all the chickens in his dominions killed, as though they were all in on a plot. After this, during his reign, Lu Huang Du will bend his subjects and their reality to his will. Meanwhile, in modern-day Australia, a man of Chinese descent is exposed as a fraud. Xiang Lu looks Chinese and for the past six months he has been employed as an interpreter at the Consulate-General of the People’s Republic of China, but he cannot speak Mandarin. He has gotten by using Google Translate. His disgrace turns into opportunity when film director, Baby Bao, offers him the chance to fly to China to the ghost city, Port Man Tou, which has been adapted as a gigantic film set and populated by a host of ‘citizen-actors’ whose lives are lived at the whim of the director. Xiang Lu has gone viral on social media – #BadChinese – after his exposure, and Baby Bao sees that Xiang’s new profile provides a lucrative opportunity.

Like the emperor, whom he claims as an ancestor, Baby Bao will become a tyrant.

Such is the premise of Siang Lu’s second published novel, Ghost Cities. I have to say from the start, this novel is immersive. It is full of classic storytelling and invention. Parts of the narrative, particularly those related to the story of old China and its fictional emperor, have a mythic quality, or read like a fairy story. Remember the thrill that stories gave when you were a child, whether they were read or viewed? Stories of mysterious kingdoms, of unscrupulous kings and clever princesses; of treachery and secrets; of hidden passages and heroes who would return to put things right. Yeah, that sort of thing. Remember Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, and Bruce Wayne’s struggle to rise from the depths of his prison – that symbolic death and rebirth? That sort of thing, too. Ghost Cities is mythic and allegorical, full of heroes and villains, and it’s just so damn good to read. Treat yourself. Access your inner child with this story written for grownups. Don’t start it until you’re comfortable in bed, with no distractions, and let yourself rediscover storytelling.

And I have to say, before I ruminate further upon this book and risk making it sound unappealing, that the modern story elements, of Xiang Lu’s experience in Baby Bao’s ghost city, is equally engaging. As a director with the use of a whole city of people at his disposal, Baby Bao is difficult to differentiate from the tyrannical Lu Huang Du. His methods of oppression are ostensibly the same: to control opportunity, thought, the reality under which people live, and to punish transgressors. The story of old China acts as a fable for the story of our modern world.

Siang Lu’s title references the ‘ghost cities’ of modern China, which have been the subject of several Western news stories over the past decade. The latest reporting I have found from this year on the subject suggests that some of these cities are currently increasing their populations. But the term ‘ghost cities’ was coined because China had built several cities (actually, some estimates say as many as fifty cities, with hundreds of development areas in addition) that were ostensibly unoccupied except, at best, by a nominal population of a few thousand people in cities built for populations in the millions. One example is Ordos Kangbashi, built in Inner Mongolia. You can view the city on Google Earth by clicking here. But in case the city grows rapidly in population in the future and Google Earth images change, I have included two satellite images of a section of the city taken in 2018 and 2022 (which is currently the latest image available):

Ordos, October 2018

Ordos, October 2022

The point is made best by focussing on the roads which are mostly free of cars; this, in the most populous nation on Earth. The latest information I can find at the time of writing estimates the population of Ordos Kangbashi in October 2025 to be around 131,000 people.

The reasons given for the construction of these cities are various. Some are explained in two videos I have included from YouTube at the end of this review (the second video looks specifically at the example of Ordos). A large factor is the limited opportunities for investment by ordinary people in China, the speculation on real estate, and the Chinese economy’s reliance upon construction for financial growth. But there is something strange about merely building a city and expecting it to populate. The risks of being the first to invest capital in an area that is largely deserted are obvious, and the situation of some cities is not desirable: they are either too remote or their climate is unappealing, or both. Historically, traditional cities have grown organically because they are sites that offer trading opportunities, or opportunities to exploit natural resources. But Ordos Kangbashi is a site that the Chinese government first overlaid with a plan, without, it seems, the attendant opportunities and advantages that would breathe life into it: like a map drawn and placed over the landscape before anything else.

I use this metaphor because in Jorge Luis Borges’ short (very short) story, On Exactitude in Science, he posited an Empire where “the Art of Cartography attained such a Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of an Empire, the entirety of a Province. ” But later, dissatisfied with this, the Cartographers create a map whose size is the same size as the Empire it purports to represent. Surely, a redundant feature. Only future generations who see that the map is useless abandon it and allow it to disintegrate. But before that, the map is the entire point and its representation supersedes the real world. Umberto Eco considered this premise in his essay, On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1, in which he sets out the practical limitations of this exercise, as well as the intellectual conclusion that the map, itself, “would itself become the empire, while the former empire would cede its power to the map.” In other words, ‘reality’ that is predicated upon whimsy and belief is not so stable.

The term I am considering here is ‘simulacrum’, useful for describing much of what we find in Ghost Cities. The term was popularised by Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard traced the progression of art and signs from a pre-industrial age to the modern era in which signification had become self-referential rather than a representation of reality. In essence, art, ‘facts’ and signs could exist independent of reality as pure simulacra: that the simulacrum could, in fact, anticipate and shape reality, so that our perceptions become divorced from the real world, and a ‘real’ world becomes the construct of communication and signification, like the map. Another way to explain this is to look at what has happened in America in the past decade under Trump, as well as in other Western cultures, in which reality is shaped through the news and through assertions that are not necessarily tied to fact: or that are based on ‘alternative facts’; that a new reality is born from stories rather than the other way around. Like the emperor becoming ruthless because he is thought to be so.

In essence this is the rationale behind China’s ghost cities and a starting point for Lu’s fiction: that these cities and our world are shaped and built upon the foundations of assertion and belief and, in turn, that our realities are shaped accordingly. Baby Bao, for example, has discovered that he is a descendant of Emperor Lu Huang Du, which has only reaffirmed his belief that he is destined for greatness. “After all,” he tells Xiang Lu, “what other role in this modern world is more like that of an Emperor than Director?” Baby Bao has shaped Port Man Tou to his own purposes and in his own image (he even creates his own currency that citizen-actors must use, all of it bearing only his image). But Baby Bao, himself, is a product of an industry of make believe, with an inflated self-belief based in part upon in a distant ancestor whom he reifies through his role as director, and his city, Port Man Tou, as empire. He even wishes to produce a biopic of the old emperor. He has already made a film, Death of a Pagoda, based upon a work produced in the emperor’s court and is now constructing a replica of Emperor Lu Huang Du’s walled palace outside the city. Like the emperor, Baby Bao creates his own hyperreality from the hubristic constructions that are intended to manifest his greatness. Everything must bend to his will. He even befouls the air in his new city that has no pollution for no other purpose than replicating the polluted air of other Chinese cities. For his city, his created thing, must be as ‘real’ as possible. He even has a Department of Verisimilitude which polices the authenticity he hopes to manufacture. Creating pollution on a massive scale to the detriment of the city’s inhabitants only serves this purpose.

Likewise, in Medieval China, Emperor Lu Huang Du has the Imperial library destroyed on a whim because he wishes to control the narrative that defines his rule. The emperor’s insecurity is inspired by stories told as amusements by his Imperial Scholars, that fashion the emperor in various stories and guises he cannot control. But one fabrication only begets another and another. Wuer, the emperor’s concubine, must recreate the lost library from memory, which is then disseminated secretly throughout the empire. In turn, it becomes the inspiration for Lu Shan Liang, the emperor’s lost son, to recreate the city in miniature from his readings of the reproduced texts. There are layers of imitation, recreation and simulation. A catalyst for much of this is merely hubris and ambition. The least threatening, least destructive characters are those who are content with a simple life, or who lead a life that benefits others.

Ghost cities is populated by fakes and simulacra, as is well demonstrated by the scene in which the emperor is served a remarkable replica of a chicken dish made of tofu, because chicken is now banned in the empire since the unfortunate death of the previous emperor. Of course, the tofu chicken is actually fake false tofu chicken, meaning that it is real, and it summarily does its job by choking the emperor with a bone in a scene that weirdly imitates the death of the first emperor – even in death there is imitation – except this now-dying emperor, it turns out, is really a fake emperor, one of the thousand ordained by the real emperor to protect himself.

Or there is the labyrinth commissioned by the emperor to be built beneath the city. The emperor intends that the labyrinth will be a representation of “his bones and memories” – a kind of psychic and physiological map realised in a physical maze – except that it in fact becomes an expression of the creative impulses of the Artisan who builds it. The labyrinth is never a place the emperor can traverse safely – to enter it and become lost is to risk a slow death – and it is instead a place to protect dissension or allow dissenters to escape the city.

Everywhere in Ghost Cities, artifice creates a new ‘reality’ and the exact nexus between truth and reality is lost or uncertain. The stories of scholars are anthropomorphised through the lives of fake emperors, and the fake emperors rule and die in the emperor’s place. In the village of Min Qiang the words of a persistent gossiper become truth. And when Ah Gong, another villager, finds a waterlogged clock while fishing, its restoration and use warp the life of the village with “the merciless mechanisms of time” in what is clearly a parody and satire of modern social media and its effect on our lives:

The villages came to rely entirely on their regimented hours. They filled their day with appointments, endless errands and house visits . . . at these gatherings they sniffed each other unhappily, hiding their discontent at how much more fulfilling the busy lives of others seemed. They carefully curated their own tales in hopes that others would envy them as well, proclaimed their own accomplishments in louder boasts, exaggerated the talents of their children, as though by sheer volume or velocity they might be saved, but from what exactly they were not quite sure.

Siang Lu’s novel is a tour de force which satirises our modern world, now founded almost entirely upon its own myths. But it plays with its own construction as a text, as well, as a further level of imitation and similitude, for its purpose. Indeed, this is a textual novel in that it is also consciously the product of other fictive creations. For instance, the emperor’s brother, Long Pong Du, is imprisoned in the lowest depths of the Six Levels of Hell, the Imperial Prison, but escapes by having an automaton constructed with which he plans to kill his brother. Of course, it is a false automaton. It does not work. It is only meant to house him inside to provide him opportunity (like a Trojan Horse). This may call to mind the first Iron Man movie and the circumstances of Tony Stark’s escape, though no reference is made to it. But by naming the automaton ‘The Manchurian’, Lu does call to mind the John Frankenheimer’s 1962 classic film, The Manchurian Candidate, in which Sergeant Raymond Shaw is brainwashed by Chinese Communists to become a lethal, though unwitting, assassin

Lu also draws upon Milton’s Paradise Lost as an allegorical allusion in this sequence. Lu quotes that poem as an epigraph to the second part of the novel, which follows briefly after Long Pong Du’s prison tale. The epigraph is from Book 11 of Paradise Lost, an extract which recalls the story of Christ being led to the top of a hill to be tempted by the devil with the sight of all the kingdoms in the world. Thus, Xiang, taken to Port Man Tou by Baby Bao, is also a new Adam in the modern world; an everyman who stands in our stead, tempted by Baby Bao’s hyperreal world, a veritable Satanic temptation in this context. Are we, too, to be tempted by the false riches of modernity and its false narratives? The importance of Milton to the novel is underscored in the story of Long Dong Pu’s epic return from the bowels of the Imperial Prison, the Six Levels of Hell, which is the longest chapter in the book. Lu chooses to tell the story in blank verse, the same verse form chosen by Milton for his epic. Thus, Long Pong Du’s return to the world from the depths of his prison recalls in reverse Satan’s triumphant return to Hell in Book 10 of Milton’s epic poem, in which his schemes finally turn to ruin.

I find it easiest to understand what I think Lu is doing by contextualising our modern moment with the intellectual concerns of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century a great fear existed around the thought that God would no longer hold moral sway in society. Darwin’s thesis on evolution was seen by many as an affront to religious belief. Nietzsche’s assertion that “God is dead” supposed that God was no longer a credible moral authority for many people. And in The Brother’s Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s character, Ivan Karamazov, asserts a belief that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. It is a phrase echoed by Lu’s character, Yuan who tells Xiang, “I don’t know what to think anymore”. Without a definite foundation of facts, in a world in which nothing can be known or believed for certain, Yuan realises, “In a city with no boundaries, everything is permitted.” Lu chooses to imagine our modern world as an echo of a past age. In Yuan’s statement we see the issue in focus. It is no longer God we have to worry about, but our ability to even agree on reality that may be our greatest challenge.

Ghost Cities is fecundly, effusively imaginative, with two stories beautifully parallelling each other, to tell a tale about tyranny and its predication on false narratives and ostentation. I can only recommend you read it.