‘Number 28 on Yongxing Jie’ is an unusual attraction in Guangzhou, China which consists of an eight-storey apartment building surrounded by a busy overpass.

The story of ‘Number 28 on Yongxing Jie’ can be traced back to the year 2008, when a number of buildings in the Haizhu District of Guangzhou were scheduled for demolition in order to make room for a new road. While most of the residents reached an agreement with developers and decided to sell their homes and relocate, three residents of a now-famous yellow apartment building drove a harder bargain, refusing to abandon their homes unless their demands were met. In the end, developers decided to abandon negotiations and instead build an overpass around the building. Today, the story of the ‘encircled’ building is known as Guangzhou’s most tenacious holdout against infrastructure developers.

Number 28 on Yongxing Jie received international news coverage in 2015, when the urban anomaly was captured in photos of the newly-inaugurated Zhoutouzui Tunnel. People were more interested in the ‘nail house’ isolated in the center of an overpass than the state-of-the-art tunnel, and the resilience of its three remaining inhabitants became a news topic.

According to a 2017 article by That’s Mags, the only remaining inhabitants of the eight-storey apartment building were Guo Zhiming and his brother, who refused to move out of their 30-square-meter home, despite having virtually no chance of being compensated by developers after the construction of the encircling overpass. At the time, Guo’s apartment was still supplied with water and electricity, and the brothers had bus stations and supermarkets within walking distance.

“Most residents received about RMB400,000 back in 2011, which, at that time, was enough for them to buy a secondhand apartment. So most took the money to buy another house,” Guo told the Southern Metropolis Daily.

Number 28 on Yongxing Jie is only the latest ‘nail house’ to be featured on Oddity Central over the years. In the past, we wrote about another Chinese house isolated in the middle of a busy road, and just last week, we wrote about the famous Zammit family house in Sidney, Australia.

 

The term ‘dingzihu’ or ‘nail house’ originated in China as a way to describe homes that stood out in the middle of demolished areas, and whose owners defiantly resisted state-ordered evictions.