Zhongshan Park

This guide to Zhongshan Park in Shenzhen opens in the spring of 1925, when news of Sun Yat-sen's death reached a rural county magistrate named Hu Yu, who responded by founding a park named for the republic's father in a corner of Guangdong that seemed too small to matter. It follows how that modest patch of land grew into something far larger, and introduces the towering stone portrait now standing at its center. The guide also reaches back to the Ming dynasty wall of Nantou behind it, raised in 1394 to fortify this coast centuries before Shenzhen existed. Walk from the sculpture toward the old stonework to feel the gap between the two.