Month: January 2019

Before I saw the advert for my current job, I’d never heard of Shenzhen, which in hindsight is quite amazing.

Its official population is nearly 13 million people (cf. Greater London: just under 9 million) and it’s estimated that the true population might be closer to 20 million due to the large migrant workforce.  It’s China’s high-tech hub and in 2016 generated four times as many patents as all British companies put together, or about 40% of China’s total for the year.  It has the third largest economic output of any Chinese city, $338 billion in 2017: bigger than Ireland, Denmark, or New Zealand.  In summary, it’s big, rich, brand new (see first post), and brimming with innovation. To ice the cake, the climate is sub-tropical.  We were sold on coming here very quickly.

In shape, Shenzhen is wider than it is high.  The richest, trendiest parts of the city (Fútián and Nánshān) are in the south, near the coast, giving way to residential suburbs and manufacturing districts as one moves north.  We’re near Hóngshān ( 红山 – Red Mountain) metro station in the Lónghuá (龙华) district of the city.  This is up beyond the Tanglang mountain park and well outside the trendy bit of town, though the area around Hongshan is admittedly a wealthy enclave within Longhua.

So, what’s Hongshan like?

Tall.  The great majority of buildings are tower blocks of 30 stories or more.  There are no houses.

Getting taller. We can see 22 construction cranes from our balcony.

Green (ish).  Shenzhen makes a strong effort to be a liveable city, and there are little parks all over the place.  Similarly, the pavements are wide… which is just as well, because it is an article of faith for moped and motor-scooter riders that roads and pavements are interchangeable.

Tasty: packed with restaurants.  Eating out is cheap, so people do it a lot.  We guess there are 50 or 60 eateries within a five minute walk of our building. Some of them screen films in the evenings for passers by.

Startlingly Western in parts.   Nearby is Nine Square (九方 – Jiŭ Fāng), a mall swisher than most of its UK cousins, and home to Starbucks, Uniqlo, a small Vanguard (Chinese offshoot of Tesco) and Muji (the Japanese John Lewis – irresistibly bland). It also contains about half of those 60 restaurants, a couple of bakeries, innumerable clothes shops, and a 12-screen cinema where we recently saw Fantastic Beasts.  Five minutes’ walk away in another direction is a vast Walmart.

Best of all: though Hongshan has quickly come to feel like a sleepy suburb, really it looks like something out of Blade Runner.

Stepping from the terminal at Hong Kong airport into the humidity and heat of early August was like walking face-first into a wall.  We fought to stay awake on the journey across the border and through downtown Shenzhen to our new home in Hongshan, with intermediate success, so that our first glimpses of the green mountains and grey towers of Hong Kong and Shenzhen came mixed with jet-lagged dreams.  The weeks that followed, as we learned to navigate our new world, are imbued in memory with a similar unreality.

Four and half months later, the temperature has dropped sharply (I actually wore a coat to the supermarket this morning) and the sky is grey, so we’re thinking of England.  We’ve also, in the meantime, segued without noticing from being confused by everything to feeling moderately at home.  Thus we find ourselves in the mood, and with the leisure, to begin the blog promised months ago.

One of my Christmas presents from B was a Shenzhen photo book.  The introduction is titled “Shenzhen, the charming city where dreams begin”, and lays out the roots of Shenzhen’s appeal, listing among other things its youthfulness (from market town of 30,000 people to city of 13 million in 30-odd years), miraculous growth (25% annual average economic growth over that time), and lush greenery.

The tagline might be a little OTT, but the word “charm” is aptly used.  We hope that, in our probably occasional and irregular posts here, we’ll manage to convey some fraction of the confusion, pleasure, and wonder that this vast, alien metropolis engenders in us.  Stay tuned for some actual content next time.