Forty-five years ago Shenzhen was a border market town of about 310,000 people, overshadowed by the old county seat at Nantou. In August 1980 Deng Xiaoping made it China's first Special Economic Zone, and what followed is the fastest city-building the world has seen: a metropolis of well over twelve million, home to Huawei and Tencent, with a skyline that now stares back at Hong Kong across the bay. It is a city of migrants, so the local culture is the culture of arriving — and that makes it an unexpectedly good place to explore with a self-guided audio guide, because almost every landmark has a story about how it got here so quickly.
Start high. The Ping An Finance Centre rises 115 storeys over Futian, and its Free Sky observation deck is the one place where the whole experiment reads at a glance: the grid of towers, the green seam of parks running north to south, and, on a clear day, the hills of Hong Kong through the telescopes. Its audio guide tells the tower's own story, and from there the rest of the city falls into place.
Futian: the civic axis and Lianhuashan
Futian is the planned heart, laid out on a north–south axis that runs from the hilltop of Lianhuashan Park down through Citizen Square to the convention centre. Locals climb Lianhuashan at dusk for the bronze statue of Deng Xiaoping striding towards the skyline he set in motion; the view from the summit is the one on every postcard. Just below, the Museum of Contemporary Art & Planning Exhibition puts the city's master plans on the wall next to its art — a good half hour, with the audio guide, on how a city gets designed from scratch.
Nantou and Dapeng: six centuries before the boom
Shenzhen is older than its reputation. Nantou Ancient City — walled in 1394, seat of Xin'an County from 1573, and once the gatekeeper of the Pearl River approach to Guangzhou — governed the land that is now both Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The old walls and south gate survive inside what became a dense urban village, and the Nantou Ancient City Museum explains how roughly forty Qing-era buildings held on through the redevelopment around them. Out on the eastern peninsula, Dapeng Fortress is the other survivor: a Ming coastal garrison whose lanes and gate towers are still intact, an hour and a half from the towers of Futian and a world away from them.
Shenzhen Bay and Shekou
The southern shore is where the city goes to breathe. Shenzhen Bay Park follows some thirteen kilometres of coast, with the Shenzhen Bay Bridge arcing across to Hong Kong and the Mangrove Nature Reserve at its western end sheltering around 255 bird species, black-faced spoonbills among them in winter. Follow the promenade west and you reach Shekou, the port district where the reforms were first tested. Sea World, built around a beached ocean liner, is the evening square of the expat quarter, and the Maki Fumihiko-designed Sea World Culture and Arts Center next door is the district's best modern building.
OCT: theme parks and the creative loft
The Overseas Chinese Town district in Nanshan is Shenzhen's playground. Window of the World packs the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum and Angkor Wat into 480,000 square metres of replicas; Splendid China Folk Village does the same for China itself, with 82 miniature landmarks and 27 full-scale ethnic villages that stage performances daily. A few streets north, the OCT Loft Creative Culture Park turns 1980s factory halls into galleries, design shops and cafés — the place to see what the city's own designers are making, and host to a design week in spring and the architecture biennale in December.
Huaqiangbei and Dafen: the city that makes things
Two districts explain Shenzhen's economy better than any museum. Huaqiangbei Commercial Street is the world's biggest electronics bazaar, and inside the SEG Electronics Market you can walk from a floor of loose resistors to a floor of finished phones — the supply chain made visible. In Longgang, Dafen Oil Painting Village once turned out an estimated sixty percent of the world's oil paintings; its lanes of studios still copy the old masters at speed, and increasingly sell original work. Both have audio guides that explain what you are looking at, which in Huaqiangbei is genuinely useful.
Beaches and mountains to the east
Past the port at Yantian the coast turns to sand. Dameisha Beach is the city's free public strand, busy on summer weekends and calm out of season, and Wutong Mountain behind it is the highest point in Shenzhen — a paved climb through forest to a summit that looks over Hong Kong's New Territories on one side and the whole city on the other.
Getting around
The metro is the way to do all of this: seventeen lines, English signage, and stations at almost every place above (Line 9 for Shenzhen Bay Park, Line 1 for OCT and Huaqiangbei, Line 2 for Shekou). Pay with Alipay or WeChat Pay, or a contactless card at the gates. Hong Kong is a fifteen-minute high-speed train from Futian station, which is why many visitors combine the two cities — start the audio guide on the train and you will arrive already knowing why this one grew so fast.