Nantou Guchengyuan

This guide to Nantou Guchengyuan in Shenzhen returns to 1661, when the Qing dynasty ordered every settlement along this coast emptied to cut off Ming loyalists raiding from Taiwan, driving roughly sixteen thousand people from what is now Shenzhen and Hong Kong. You'll hear how the fourteenth-century walls built to guard the Pearl River approach to Guangzhou were partly dismantled for a new inland boundary, and how few of the displaced ever made it home when the ban lifted eight years later. Stand at the southern gate beneath the inscription Ning Nan, Peace in the South, and consider what those words meant to a town that had been emptied out.