The county town that governed Hong Kong
The story Shenzhen tells about itself starts with a fishing village and a line drawn on a map. It is a good story and it is not quite true. Walk through the south gate at Nantou, in what is now Nanshan district, and you are inside a walled county town whose site has been settled since 331 CE and whose present ramparts went up in 1394, when the early Ming revived coastal defence after the fall of the Yuan.
What was administered from behind those walls was not a village. Nantou was the seat of Xin'an County, and Xin'an County covered the whole of this coast — the land that is now Shenzhen, and the land that is now Hong Kong. For most of the last six centuries, the place that governed both was here.
The line on the map
The modern city begins in 1980, when Shenzhen was designated China's first Special Economic Zone: a controlled experiment in foreign investment, private enterprise and export manufacturing, placed deliberately against the Hong Kong border so that capital and know-how had the shortest possible distance to travel.
The result is the fastest large-scale urbanisation in recorded history, and a population that arrived from everywhere else. Shenzhen has no single native cuisine because it has no single native population — which is why the food that is genuinely local comes from the old Bao'an county traditions that predate the zone: the oyster beds at Shajing, farmed since the Song dynasty, and the roast goose of Gongming.
Reading the axis
Stand at the Deng Xiaoping statue on Lianhuashan and the city arranges itself for you. Directly below is the Civic Center under its enormous wave of a roof; beyond it the towers of the Futian CBD; and dead centre, closing the composition, Ping An Finance Centre — 599 metres of Kohn Pedersen Fox glass, the fourth-tallest building in the world.
None of that alignment is accidental. The park, the government seat and the commercial towers sit on a single north–south axis, a device lifted from imperial Chinese city planning and applied, at enormous scale, to a city that did not exist when the drawings were made. The statue at the top of the axis is of the man who authorised the experiment. It is not a subtle piece of urban design, and it is not trying to be.
The edge of the water
Shenzhen's southern boundary is not a road but an estuary. At Shenzhen Bay Park the city runs out into mangroves — a national reserve that feeds migratory birds on the East Asian flyway, sitting inside one of the densest urban areas on earth.
Across that water is Hong Kong: close enough to pick out individual buildings, and, from the platforms under Futian Station, about fourteen minutes away by Express Rail Link. The border is simultaneously the view at the end of the day and a short ride from the middle of it — which is, in a sense, the whole point of the place.
What the city is now
The manufacturing that built Shenzhen has largely moved on or moved up. What replaced it is a hardware and software economy dense enough that a visitor can, in an afternoon, ride in a driverless taxi, take delivery of a drink by drone, and watch a humanoid robot demonstrate itself in a shop. The Michelin Guide arrived here for the first time this year and handed out seven stars, two of them to Cantonese kitchens.
It remains a city that rewards knowing what to look at. The towers are legible from anywhere; the county town, the oyster beds and the mangroves are the parts you have to go and find.