Shenzhen Central Park

This guide to Shenzhen Central Park traces a strip of land that spent most of the 1990s with no name, only a job: a buffer zone left standing while the city around it transformed at record speed after becoming a Special Economic Zone in 1980. It follows what stood here before the towers, the farming and fishing community of about thirty thousand people displaced by the boom, and the 1998 decision to finally turn the greenbelt into a public park, opened within nine months to mark a national anniversary. Look for the international sculptures scattered across the lawns, works by artists from the United States, Germany, and France, planted among the lychee trees that once grew wild here.