He’s become a folk hero, but wishes he could ‘turn back time’
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Huang Ping lives in a two-story house southwest of Shanghai with his 11-year-old grandson. When authorities came knocking, asking if he would move to make way for a highway, Ping told them to pound sand.
As the highway project moved ahead, authorities returned to Ping with a better offer. Would Ping take $239,650 for his small lot? You can probably guess the answer was still “no.”
The powers that be were eager to get Ping to move, so they tried to sweeten the deal. They found an alternate property where he and his grandson could live and offered to toss that in. He just shook his head. So they found another property. And another. Ping still wasn’t having it.
At wit’s end, the road builders asked their engineers to redesign the road—leaving room for Ping’s house. The result is a divided highway, both lanes of which make a sharp turn and pass directly around Ping’s home. The raised roadbed passes so near his house that both stories are surrounded by a tall, concrete wall. Being in the house must feel like living in a cave—a very loud cave.
The sight of the road around Ping’s house is cartoonish, like something from Pixar’s Up or Dr. Seuss’s The Zax. Naturally, it has become a bit of a meme on the Chinese news. But with China’s decades of record-shattering development, it’s far from the first time this has happened. In fact, the Chinese have a clever slang phrase for holdout houses that force developers to redesign big buildings and roads: “nail houses.”
‘Strongest nail house owner’
Huang Ping’s stubbornness has earned him a nickname in the Chinese media: “Strongest nail house owner.” So is Ping sitting on his porch and laughing at the construction workers? Not quite. He admits he spends most of his time in town to avoid the construction noise.
The construction should be complete soon, but the noise is here to stay. The road opens to traffic next spring. The reality of the situation is finally hitting Ping. “If I could turn back time, I would agree to the demolition conditions.” You can see the road nearing completion in the video embedded below:
