Shekou Old Street

This guide to Shekou Old Street in Shenzhen opens in the summer of 1979, with a former Communist guerrilla in his sixties, now running a state shipping company, watching workers set charges on an empty peninsula. It follows Yuan Geng, a man who had fought the Japanese and survived the Cultural Revolution, and the risky proposal that let this stretch of coast operate outside socialist orthodoxy, growing into China's first industrial zone open to foreign investment. The old Lingnan arcades around you, with their carved brick eaves, were already standing when it all began.