Ordos City
— — a city built faster than people arrived.
Not only on a wall.
“A planned city on the Mongolian steppe, raised in a decade on coal wealth and ambition. Kangbashi, the new district twenty-five kilometres south of old Dongsheng, has wide boulevards, civic plazas, and a bronze pair of fighting horses at its centre. For years it stood mostly empty and earned a nickname abroad. The population has since grown into it, slowly, in the way frontier cities do. The air is dry. The light is long. The grass beyond the ring road still belongs to the herders.
Ordos City, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ordos is a prefecture-level city in southwestern Inner Mongolia, set on the Ordos Plateau inside the great northern bend of the Yellow River. Its administrative seat is Kangbashi District, a planned new town finished around 2010 about twenty-five kilometres south of the older urban centre at Dongsheng. The prefecture covers roughly 87,000 square kilometres of steppe, sand, and coal seam, with a population of about 2.2 million across seven banners. Wealth from the Shenfu coalfield and rare-earth deposits funded the build-out that gave the city its global reputation.
Kangbashi is reached most easily by air through Ordos Ejin Horo Airport, about fifty kilometres south, or by high-speed rail from Hohhot in roughly two hours. The Genghis Khan Mausoleum at Ejin Horo Banner, the ceremonial cenotaph of the Mongol founder, sits within an hour's drive and remains the region's central pilgrimage site. Summer days run hot and dry; winter nights drop well below freezing on the open steppe. The wide central axis of Kangbashi, anchored by the Ordos Museum and the bronze horses of Genghis Khan Square, is best walked in the long light of late afternoon.
The plateau sits around 1,300 metres above sea level, on the southern edge of the Gobi's reach. The air is thin and dry; annual rainfall is under 400 millimetres and most of it falls in July and August. Spring brings dust off the Mu Us Sandland to the south, and the city has spent two decades planting shelter belts to push the sand back. Winters are clear, cold, and lit by a low sun that turns the boulevards amber for the last hour before dusk.