Shenzhen - Silicon Valleys and Ancient Alleys

Forty years ago, Shenzhen was a modest town of around 30,000 people. Today, it’s a magnet for ambitious Chinese professionals from across the country, an 18-million-person metropolis that pulses with energy and purpose.

Home to tech giants like Tencent, Huawei, and DJI, a major Apple manufacturing hub, and the birthplace of BYD, Shenzhen has earned its reputation as China’s Silicon Valley. This didn’t happen by accident. In the 1980’s, Shenzhen was designated China’s first ‘Special Economic Zone’, granting it economic and financial privileges it enjoys to this day. With a ‘little’ help from that head start, it has grown into the third most influential economic force in the country, trailing only Beijing and Shanghai. Not too shabby.

I visited Shenzhen twice, in the springs of 2024 and 2025, accompanying my husband on business trips. It was on the second visit, that I had a few days to explore it a bit more.

The curious tech-lover in me briefly considered hunting down the tech districts, but an inkling told me they’d be more impressive on a screen than from a pavement.

So, instead, I headed to the new Futian district, to check out the financial district and the shopping areas. It didn’t disappoint.

The first impression – THE high rises.  Made of steel and glass, grey-toned concrete, each tower soaring so high my neck ached just trying to find their tops. Built by humans for humans, they somehow managed to look utterly alien, lined up like soldiers on parade along wide, six-lane streets. And, on that late morning weekday, the streets were surprisingly quiet – just a few cars, even fewer pedestrians. No photograph I took came close to capturing it; what I really needed was a drone.

However, walking down towards Coco Park helped. This rather new mall was definitely a nice landing back to earth - multi-terraced, full of open spaces, boutiques and restaurants, and buzzing with life. I walked around checking out some fashions stores, sat down for a coffee and ice cream and quietly observed people around me, trying to guess how they were feeling that day, what could they be talking about. Yeah, I know, a guilty pleasure of mine.

Good news is that Shenzhen does have a far more colourful and cultural side. Alongside its high-tech reputation, it is home to thriving art events, modern museums, the largest oil painting copy market in China, fortress cities, food and shopping galore. And this is what I would like to spend more time telling you about.

Dafen Oil Painting Village (大芬油画村) aka The Oil Painting Copy Market

I decided to go there during the morning, hoping it wouldn’t be too hot. See, even though it was just April, Shenzhen’s subtropical climate was already getting the temperature in the high 20 degrees Celsius. Summer is even worse, you’re either dripping from the heat or the rain, and often both.

I picked an entrance at random and started walking, not quite sure what to expect. It took only a few steps down a narrow street to understand why the Chinese name of a “village” was far more fitting than the English one. This wasn’t a market, it was a quarter, a maze of alleys lined with painting ateliers and galleries ranging from bare bones to impressively grand, plus quirky cafés and small restaurants tucked in between. Paintings were everywhere: the valuable ones hung on walls inside and out, others leaned against shop fronts on the pavement, and some, apparently sold by weight, unframed, were simply piled in warehouse-style rooms where you could buy by the kilo.

I hadn’t expected Van Gogh to dominate quite so thoroughly. One painter had apparently built an entire career around his work and was quite well known for it. Nor had I expected to round a corner and find the Starry Night sprawled across a building wall with a fitting yellow colour phone charger station.

What genuinely surprised me was the quality of the work. Most of the paintings were good, really good. And not everything was a copy; there were plenty of originals too.

The idea of copying an artist sounds kind of cheap, but then again, there is only one authentic Starry Night, and only one person in the world can own it. Having a high-quality reproduction by a talented painter who is clearly obsessed, fascinated, devoted, take your pick, feels less like imitation and more like shared admiration for the original. Standing there among the canvases, it somehow didn’t feel cliché anymore. It made me pause and reconsider my whole attitude towards copying.

One of the fondest moments of my visit came unexpectedly. As I wandered around, I was drawn to a moon gate carved into an old wall - solid and austere, entirely out of place among the casual, fragile-looking shops around it. By now I had learned that Chinese buildings run deep, and that simplicity in architecture tends to signal sophistication. So, I stepped through.

My instinct was right, beyond what I could have imagined. I found myself inside the Sunrise Art Centre, an art space staged within an old building that partly incorporated a traditional Hakka house. It was hosting paintings, furniture, and traditional musical instruments. The building itself, rooted in classic Chinese architecture with intricate wooden carvings and mindfully placed gardens, allowed air and light to flow through with a quiet grace. It felt like an invitation to harmony: between past and present, old and new, classical and contemporary.

As I rested on a reclaimed wood bench, enjoying the cool of the stone walls, came the best part. A small group of young Chinese were taking photographs nearby, clearly having a good time together, and I had been watching them with quiet admiration, not least because of their impressive photography equipment, which seems to be a non-negotiable item of identity for the young generation. So, when one young lady approached me, with a touching shyness, and asked if I would model some traditional jewellery they were marketing, I was genuinely stunned. I was sweaty after my walk, had just removed my hat, and had absolutely no idea what state my hair was in. I said yes without thinking too much about any of that and, when I saw the joy on her face, I forgot about it entirely.

Nantou (南头) Ancient City

While Shenzhen is known as new megacity in China, its roots run deep. Nantou Ancient City, today a subdistrict of Shenzhen, has its origins dating back to around 300. Throughout history it sat at the heart of the region’s economy and politics and the solid walls and old stone buildings, now restored and repurposed for modern life, are testimony to a glorious past.

If you are like me and like strolling down narrow streets, visiting museums, watching people go about their day, poking around boutiques, Nantou is the perfect playground for it.

I love taking in this kind of medley: an old ceramic window carving on an ancient wall topped with timeless, intricate roof tiles, infinitely more refined than the concrete high-rise looming in the background; a narrow gate whose beautiful arch is decorated with a colourful ceramic design, leading into a seemingly ordinary residential area; ancient calligraphy that would once have adorned the entrance of a house or a village, now carefully preserved behind glass because the craftsmanship it represents is probably beyond what anyone could replicate today. And, hiding in plain sight within and among the old buildings: cafés, small restaurants, artisanal and fashion boutiques, ice cream shops, museums; everything you’d expect from a trendy, modern urban quarter.

Dongmen Pedestrian Street

Reminding, only as scale, of Shanghai’s East Nanjing Road, Dongmen Street is a shopping area where a mere mortal can find and afford reasonably good quality goods - clothing, shoes, electronics, and an assortment of everything else. While initially I only intended to so some window shopping, I did, in the end, succumb to the gentil perseverance from a salesperson; in all honesty, I’m rather fond of the dress and I remember the whole experience with a smile.

The ‘street’ is, in fact, a maze of streets that can get confusing when tall buildings block your sense of direction. I’d recommend going there in the evening. The night lights give the whole place a lively buzz, and the temperature will be considerably more bearable.

Dapeng (大鹏)

Shenzhen is a city that grew fast, perhaps too fast for a symbiosis to develop at scale between old and new. There are pockets of calm, increasingly sought after by a growing class of professionals looking for a more balanced lifestyle, but demand far exceeds the supply. The city does have beach access, though I had been told it’s something of a race to claim a spot on weekends. I never made it to the Shenzhen shoreline myself and didn’t try to hard, because it seemed it wouldn’t have surpassed the experience I had had in Dapeng, the year before, in March 2024.

Technically part of Shenzhen (the administrative hierarchy is complicated, I’ll spare you), Dapeng sits about an hour’s drive east of the city proper. Here, quiet means quiet.

The old town has a rural feel, and the Dapeng new area is gradually getting a stylish facelift; old seaside buildings spruced up to host sophisticated restaurants overlooking the sea, with menus to match and modern architectural accessories. The white-painted buildings, steep roads, and cliff-hanging structures had something of a Greek landscape. Being the year of the Dragon, there was no shortage of celebratory impersonations of the most revered animal in the Chinese calendar. 

Dapeng Ancient Town

Sister fortress city to Nantou Ancient Town is the Dapeng Ancient Town. We went there during a late weekday evening. Night had already fallen over the century-old walls, and a peaceful atmosphere settled over the whole place. Some of the narrow alleys were warmly lit by small shops; others were wrapped in mysterious shadow. Red lanterns and subdued lights adorned the entrances of restaurants tucked inside traditional Chinese courtyards. It was, simply put, magical.

Last, but not least, a few words about Shenzhen street food. There were plenty of stalls on the Dongmen street but I didn’t try any, even though they were mostly freshly cooked and in demand.

However, the Shenzhen to HongKong train station is one place I would have definitely found something to my liking if only it wouldn’t have been so late when we got there. The (seemingly) mile long train station is flanked by shops offering local food you can only find here. Fresh and inexpensive, it was quite a show. Being the freshwater crab season, the offering of the tightly tied crustaceans was generous and quite a sight to see.

Shenzhen is not a city you come to by accident. You come for business, or because someone tells you to, or because you spotted it on a list. But somewhere between the forest of glass towers, the paint-scented alleys of Dafen, the moon gate that leads somewhere unexpected, and a quiet evening in an ancient courtyard lit by red lanterns, it gets under your skin.

It is a city of contradictions held together with remarkable confidence: ancient and ultramodern, frenetic and surprisingly serene, a manufacturing powerhouse with a genuine artistic soul. If you haven't been, consider this your personal recommendation to go. Give it more than a weekend if you can.

And if you do go, there's a natural next step. Shenzhen sits at one corner of what I've come to think of as the Southern China Triangle, three cities within striking distance of each other, each utterly different, each unmissable. Hong Kong and Macau complete the picture, and between the three of them, they offer a unique concentrated travel experience that is hard to find somewhere else.

More on that soon.