I used Google maps in the past days to marvel about Beijing’s new airport, Daxing. If you look closely you see the train tracks that are being built southbound. You see that they are mostly straight, mostly on stilts (still being built) but further south they also cross through some towns - where lines of houses have been removed. You can see several camps along the route, probably for construction workers to live directly by the construction site (some farmland had to go for that) - judging from the number of buildings it must be 1000s of them. Then, close to the end, you see massive construction work for what seems to become a major transportation hub, similar to the express train stations in Xi’an (8 million people) or Shanghai Hongqiao (220000 passengers/day). Yet, there isn’t much around it - a few smaller towns and villages. A bit further south the tracks seem to end north of the city of Xiong. The first trains are scheduled to be run in 2 years.

It’s a glimpse of the next project in preparation: the megacity of Xiong’an, which is to be built until 2050 to complement Beijing and Tianjin, totalling an area of about 110 million people.

This is all just very hard to fathom.