Shenzhen leapt from rice paddies to China's Silicon Valley
Shenzhen, a Guangdong prefecture-level city and special economic zone on the Pearl River estuary beside Hong Kong, was largely rural until city status in 1979. Deng Xiaoping's early-1980s reforms made it China's first SEZ; GaWC now rates it Alpha-, with a stock exchange among the world's largest by capitalization.
People have lived on this stretch of coast for about 6,700 years, and the walled towns of Nantou and Dapeng date back more than six centuries. Qin Shi Huang placed the area under the Nanhai Commandery in 214 BC; from 331 the seat of a new commandery and of Bao'an County stood near Nantou. By the twelfth century Nantou traded salt and spices across the South China Sea, pearls followed in the thirteenth, and sailors bound for Southeast Asia prayed at a Mazu temple in Chiwan. The Ming defeated a Portuguese fleet at the Battle of Tunmen just south of Nantou.
The border shaped it long before reform. Coastal residents were moved inland against pirates, and in 1669 Bao'an was absorbed into Dongguan. After the Opium Wars Britain took Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, and in 1898 it leased the New Territories for 99 years. In 1911 the Chinese section of the Kowloon–Canton Railway opened with Shenzhen as its last stop, and during the 1925 Canton–Hong Kong strike the town hosted a reception station for strikers. In 1941 British troops blew up the Lo Wu Bridge to stop the Japanese crossing.
From the 1950s to the late 1970s somewhere between 100,000 and 560,000 people fleeing upheaval sheltered in the county while trying to reach Hong Kong. In 1978 a State Council team proposed turning Bao'an and Zhuhai into export bases, and Xi Zhongxun, Guangdong's party secretary and father of Xi Jinping, chose the name Shenzhen for the new city.
The results are visible in the numbers: about 18.2 million people in 2025, the world's fourth-busiest container port, the second-largest count of skyscrapers of any city, and home to Huawei, Tencent, DJI, Oppo and the carmaker BYD.
Source: Shenzhen
