Dongmen Pedestrian Street Legislative Jiaoyushi

This guide finds a small room devoted to the rule of law tucked among the bubble tea stalls and phone-case carts of Dongmen Pedestrian Street in Shenzhen, and asks how it landed there. It traces the neighborhood back to 1688 as a Qing Dynasty market town trading grain, textiles and poultry, through nearly three centuries in the same lanes you're walking now, and into 1980, when Shenzhen became a Special Economic Zone and Dongmen turned into the stage for everything that followed. It leaves you at the stalls outside, where commerce and law, it argues, grew up together.