Shenzhen Museum

This guide to Shenzhen Museum opens in January 1992, when an eighty-seven-year-old Deng Xiaoping, holding no official post, arrived in the city whose Special Economic Zone he had launched in 1980. It follows the political danger the reforms were in three years after Tiananmen, as hardliners moved to slow and reverse them, and the eleven days Deng spent touring factories and a stock exchange, planting a tree, and riding through streets Beijing's state media pretended not to notice. You'll see the everyday objects from that visit that the museum still keeps, including the garden spade he used to plant that tree.