许家印的伦敦豪宅：全英国最贵的房子，卡成了死结

Today, a rather surreal story, centered on London's most expensive mansion.

Just how expensive is this mansion?

It was bought for £210 million.

That's roughly 2 billion yuan.

Yet this sky-high-priced house now sits empty, with no one living in it.

It's been empty for several years.

Behind it lies the story of Evergrande and Xu Jiayin.

You may have heard the name Xu Jiayin.

He was once China's richest man, holding a behemoth company called Evergrande.

Xu Jiayin, in fact, climbed up step by step from a very poor rural village.

At his peak, he was worth hundreds of billions.

Evergrande was in real estate — plainly put, building and selling homes.

In those years Evergrande built countless projects, and Xu Jiayin raked it in.

It was during his richest years that he bought this London mansion.

By the way, he bought it together with another Hong Kong tycoon — they split the cost.

Just how over-the-top is this house?

It has 45 rooms, four elevators, and an indoor swimming pool.

It has over a hundred windows, many facing London's Hyde Park.

It's a truly top-tier mansion.

But the good times didn't last.

What came next you probably know — Evergrande blew up.

Its debt was an astronomical figure it simply couldn't repay.

By 2024, Evergrande officially went bankrupt.

Really, the biggest losers in the collapse weren't Xu Jiayin, but ordinary people.

Many paid up, only for their homes to stall unfinished.

A family's hard-earned savings got trapped inside, unrecoverable.

Xu Jiayin himself landed in deep trouble, and this year admitted to financial fraud.

So the question is: who does this London mansion actually belong to now?

This is where it gets murky.

The property isn't registered in Xu Jiayin's name.

It was bought through an offshore company, with the ultimate owner being his wife, Ding Yumei.

And Ding Yumei holds Canadian citizenship.

Beyond this mansion, Ding reportedly holds dozens of London flats and Canadian property too, worth several hundred million pounds all together.

Later, Xu Jiayin and Ding Yumei divorced.

Many suspect the divorce was, in part, about moving assets around.

Either way, the trouble began with the divorce.

The situation now is completely stuck.

On one side, Evergrande's liquidators want the house to repay debt, but can't touch it.

On the other, Ding Yumei wants to sell, but the court froze the assets, so she can't.

Neither side can move, so the house just stays empty.

In fact, the house was put up for sale long ago.

In 2022 the price dropped to £200 million, yet still no buyer.

It was once called Britain's most expensive house.

Now the "most expensive" title remains, but not a single soul inside.

One year, two, three — always empty inside.

But the most surreal part isn't even the empty house.

It's that someone actually lives at its door.

He's a Swede who used to be a reporter.

With little money, he built a nest under the porch of this top-tier mansion.

With a pile of umbrellas, he propped up a tiny home for himself.

He calls it his "pretend home and garden."

He's lived here for three years straight.

Picture the scene.

One of the world's priciest houses, utterly empty inside.

And at its door, an ordinary man treats it as his home.

This mansion is really a miniature of Evergrande.

Once boundlessly glorious, now cold and still, stuck in place with no way forward.

A house is meant to be lived in.

Yet this priciest house has not a single occupant.

It just stands frozen in London — a lingering silhouette of Evergrande's great collapse.

Okay, that's the story for today; see you next time.