The ‘bicycle graveyard’ (Picture: Imaginechina/REX/Shutterstock)

It looks like a magic eye picture, but look closely and you can make out thousands and thousands of bike frames.

Around 84,000 bicycles have been left here at the field in Hangzhou, in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province.

They belonged to bike sharing businesses which are growing in popularity around China, but have been abandoned.

Similar to the ‘Boris Bike’ scheme, people can ride off with the bikes (the first hour is free) and the idea is they will then lock them up so they can be used by someone else when they are done.


Thousands of bikes lined up on a field (Picture: Imaginechina/Rex)

It’s in Hangzhou, China (Picture: Rex)

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But cyclists often just dump the bikes in inconvenient places, where they block pavements, for example, so authorities remove them.

And the companies have been slow to come and reclaim them, leaving them to rust to avoid the hassle.

What is the Ig Nobel Prize and who won it this year?The ‘graveyard’ of bikes comes from police rounding up thousands and thousands of bikes and storing them.

It’s not clear what will happen to them now – the Chinese government is considering how to regulate the industry to prevent it happening.

The sprawling acres of rubbish underline how much waste humans create.

But they also form something beautiful, with the photos compared to Impressionist or Surrealist paintings.