Shenzhen

Shenzhen is a city in Guangdong province in southern China, on the Pearl River Delta across the border from Hong Kong. Its name means ‘deep drains’, after the ditches that once ran between its rice fields.

Huawei, which makes telecom network equipment and smartphones, has its head office and a large research campus in the north of the city. Tencent, the maker of WeChat and a publisher of video games, is based in Shenzhen too, and BYD builds electric cars, buses and batteries from its headquarters in the east of the city. DJI, started there by Frank Wang after his studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, designs camera drones and handheld gimbals.

Shenzhen was a small market town of Bao'an County beside the railway crossing to Hong Kong when the county was made the city of Shenzhen in 1979. In 1980 it became the first special economic zone of China, where Deng Xiaoping let foreign and private companies invest under rules of their own. The zone filled with export factories making toys, clothes and electronics on the former farmland and fishing villages. Deng toured the city again in the early 1990s to back the reforms, and a bronze statue of him striding forward stands on Lianhua Hill in the city center.

Window of the World, a theme park in the west of the city, shows small copies of the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids of Giza and other famous buildings. In Dafen, a former village in the north, painters copy works by Van Gogh and other famous artists in workshops along its lanes and sell them to buyers abroad. The Ping An Finance Center, finished in the 2010s, rises 599 m (1,965 ft) above the business district of Futian. Huaqiangbei, a quarter of electronics markets, sells chips, screens and every other part to inventors and small makers of gadgets.