A shopping mall that cost $1.3 billion to build, with a 25-meter replica of the Arc de Triomphe, a 2.1-kilometer indoor canal with gondolas, a copy of St. Mark's bell tower, and space for 2,350 stores across 9.6 million square feet. And for years it was 99 percent empty. In this episode we explore the South China Mall in Dongguan, China, how it became the world's most infamous ghost mall, and how it has spent nearly two decades trying to reinvent itself.

We look at the instant noodle billionaire Hu Guirong who funded the project, the seven zones modeled on Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Venice, Egypt, the Caribbean, and California, and the fatal assumption that affluent shoppers from Guangzhou and Shenzhen would travel to a manufacturing hub of low-income migrant workers with no public transit. We explain the build-it-and-they-will-come fallacy, w ...