Huaqiangbei Commercial Street

This guide to Huaqiangbei Commercial Street in Shenzhen starts with a weapons factory that arrived from northern Guangdong in 1979, and the unlikely path from there to a hardware district modeled on Tokyo's Akihabara. It follows Ma Fuyuan's 1988 opening of the SEG Electronics Market, where vendors packed meter-wide counters with chips and circuit boards, and traces Tencent's early roots in the same district. The guide also covers the shanzhai era after 2003, when a cheap chipset let anyone design a phone here and new models launched by the day. Look up at the towers crowding the skyline as you walk the street.