恒大崩塌的一个背影：许家印那栋空置的伦敦顶级豪宅

Today I want to talk about a house — a truly surreal one.

It sits in the heart of London's Knightsbridge, once dubbed Britain's most expensive mansion.

In early 2020 it sold for a staggering £210 million — roughly 2 billion yuan.

Yet this top-tier mansion now stands locked and empty, uninhabited for several years.

The reason it sits empty ties back to the earth-shaking collapse of Evergrande and Xu Jiayin.

First, the man himself.

Xu Jiayin rose from a poor rural village, building from nothing all the way to China's richest man.

His Evergrande was once among the nation's largest property giants.

Plainly put, Evergrande's business was buying land, building, selling — then using the proceeds to buy still more land.

In its most glorious years, Evergrande built countless projects and Xu Jiayin raked in fortunes.

It was at the peak of his wealth that he snapped up this London mansion.

Back then Xu Jiayin flew around on private jets, mingling in elite circles — the picture of prestige.

Just how lavish is this house?

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

The whole building has over a hundred windows, more than sixty facing London's famous Hyde Park.

The mansion has quite a pedigree — merged from several houses, with a two-story basement and approved plans to expand further.

For years it was a gold-standard name in London's top-end property market.

By any measure, it's the very top of the top.

But the good times didn't last.

What followed you've probably heard: Evergrande imploded.

Its debt was astronomical — over $300 billion at its peak — long past solvency and impossible to repay.

What does $300 billion even mean?

It's more than many countries earn in a whole year.

By 2024, Evergrande formally entered bankruptcy liquidation.

And the hardest hit in the collapse weren't Xu Jiayin, but countless ordinary homebuyers.

Many families emptied their savings on a down payment, only to see construction stall — a lifetime's earnings locked away.

Xu Jiayin didn't escape unscathed either; this year he admitted to multiple charges including financial fraud, and awaits final sentencing.

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

This is where things get murky.

The property isn't registered to Xu Jiayin, but held through an offshore company, with his wife Ding Yumei as ultimate beneficiary.

More delicately still, Ding holds Canadian citizenship, and back then she bought the house jointly with another Hong Kong tycoon.

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

Later still, Xu Jiayin and Ding Yumei divorced.

Outsiders widely suspect the divorce wasn't purely personal, but carried a whiff of shifting assets and slipping the net.

But whatever the intent, the real trouble began precisely with the divorce.

The current situation, in a word, is a deadlock.

On one end, Evergrande's liquidators are eager to cash in the asset to repay debt, but can't touch it.

On the other, Ding wants to sell and cash out, but the court froze the assets, so she can't sell either.

The two forces lock each other in place, leaving the house suspended in mid-air, beyond anyone's reach.

One year, two, three go by, and the house stays utterly empty.

But the most absurd part isn't even the empty house itself.

It's that, beneath its grand porch, a man has lived year-round.

He's a Swede, once a tech reporter, now with nothing to his name.

At the door of the world's priciest mansion, he built a crude shelter from a pile of umbrellas.

He jokingly calls this tiny patch his "pretend home and garden," and has stayed three years.

Go ahead and picture the scene.

One of the world's most expensive houses, hollow inside and gathering dust.

And at its door, a penniless ordinary man makes it his home.

As early as 2022 the house was relisted at £200 million, yet still found no buyer.

By rights, selling a priceless house to repay debt should be the natural thing to do.

Yet it's wedged in the cracks of ownership and citizenship, unable to budge.

From swaths of unfinished buildings back in China to this empty London mansion, Evergrande has left many messes behind.

And this priciest empty house is merely the most glaring — and most ironic — of them.

In the end, a house's plainest purpose is to be lived in.

Yet this so-called priciest mansion became the emptiest house of all.

On one side, the emptiness within; on the other, the stranger at the door who calls his umbrellas home.

That contrast of cold and warm is more moving than any number.

Evergrande's story is, in a way, a microcosm of two decades of Chinese real estate — build, borrow, build again, charging ahead until one day the machine could turn no more.

And this empty London house is like a single frame of those crazy years, frozen forever.

It stands frozen in London — a cold silhouette of Evergrande's great collapse, left in a foreign land.

Okay, that's where the story ends; see you next time.