'Its pulse is unsteady but we can see colour in its cheeks'

China is a foreign country; they do things differently there. From a Western perspective some of those differences are unpalatable – the blocking of certain globally used websites, the inflexible, inward-looking attitude, the continual hawking and spitting. Some differences, though, offer hope that one day there may be less to separate us than to unite us. The difference that is Yiqi racecourse, for example.

Yiqi racecourse is in Inner Mongolia, in the cradling arms of the Yellow River, in the middle of what used to be nowhere 450 miles west of Beijing, in what is still pretty much the middle of nowhere despite the precipitate construction of the vast city of Ordos, thrown up almost overnight over the land where Genghis Khan and his Mongol cohorts once galloped from horizon to horizon and conquered all that lay between.

The city of Ordos has been dubbed a 'Ghost City' as many of the tower blocks are largely empty

Ordos – there is a little local difficulty over the pronunciation, but 'Er-dos' seems to hold sway – gleams somnolently in the sweaty warmth of a Mongolian summer, living proof that even if you build it, they don't always come. It has been dubbed the 'Ghost City' for its vast tracts of tower blocks in which only a few people live; construction is still busily ongoing nevertheless, the money from a colossal mining empire of coal and natural gas brought to the surface and made ostentatiously visible, all in the hope that one day these tower blocks, apartments, offices and skyscrapers will all become home and workplace to many, many millions. Three-quarters of an hour away by road, a high-speed transit thanks to the driving habits of the locals, Yiqi racecourse hints at what might be.