Two Shenzhens: A journey through the city's transformation

After almost a year living up north, where Beijing sprawls under a cool, pale sun and where the city's administrative grandeur gives it a certain sternness, I decided to venture out into China's south, with Shenzhen first on my list.

I'd heard all the usual north-south lore before heading down – the south's warmth compared to the north's bluntness, rice over noodles, the soft cadence of Cantonese against the clipped efficiency and the rolled "r"-s of Beijingers' Mandarin up north. 

Here's what I knew as the shorthand version of the Shenzhen story: in 1979, this was a fishing town of about 20,000 people on the edge of the Pearl River estuary. Deng Xiaoping picked it as one of China's first Special Economic Zones, and in under 40 years it became a megacity of over 17 million, its economy growing more than 13,000-fold. 

This is also, unavoidably, China's Silicon Valley – Tencent and Huawei both call it home, and the business-friendly policies here keep pulling in startups and international companies every year.

The numbers are impressive, but nothing compared to the actual experience of visiting the megacity and seeing it for myself. 

I got there on the Beijing-Hong Kong bullet train, with Shenzhen as the second-to-last stop. As someone who's not a fan of flying, China's railway is something I've come to genuinely love – incredibly fast, efficient and so stable at 350 km/h that you could balance a full cup of water on the windowsill and not lose a drop. 

First impressions

Shenzhen greeted me in two colors – green and blue, peppered with the occasional white and pink of the spring blooms and petals in the parks, streets, everywhere. The March air had a crisp, clean edge to it, and the whole place smelled incredibly fresh. 

Despite the population explosion, the city has actually won national awards as a "garden city" – there are more green spaces tucked between the towers than I expected, from the Mangrove Nature Reserve to Fairy Lake Botanical Garden.

Stop one: The museum that explains the city

As a self-proclaimed architecture enthusiast, the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning (MOCAUP) sat high on my list.

The museum is actually two institutions sharing one striking building – an 80,000-square-meter deconstructivist statement piece designed by the Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, opened in 2017. The steel-and-glass exterior looks like it's mid-motion, which makes sense for a museum that's essentially telling the story of an ever-expanding city. Inside, expansive galleries, a central atrium and rooftop terraces are built around light and open circulation, and I drifted between the art wing and the urban planning wing almost without noticing the transition.

The contemporary art side rotates through Chinese and international artists – Zaha Hadid's exhibition ongoing at the time of my visit – but it was the urban planning wing that left me in awe – massive interactive displays, scale models and immersive digital installations that walked me through Shenzhen's evolution. Standing in front of a lit-up model of the city, watching it "grow" decade by decade, is a strange feeling when you've just spent the morning walking through the real, finished version of that timeline.

Stop two: The villages the skyscrapers grew out of

However, there was something else I wanted to see firsthand before it became history – the urban villages, or cun, that made the "miracle" physically possible.

Scattered across Shenzhen, wedged between and sometimes almost underneath the skyscrapers, are the chengzhongcun – "villages in the city." These are what's left of the original farming villages that stood here before 1979, whose residents kept land rights even as the city grew up around them. Locals built up instead of out, narrow towers close enough to pass things window to window, to house the millions of migrant workers who came to build – and now staff – the Shenzhen everyone photographs. 

Many of Shenzhen's urban villages have already been redeveloped or demolished over the past two decades as land values climbed; Xiangxicun is one of the ones still standing, though it's a fair bet it won't stay this way forever.

The first time I actually saw Xiangxicun, I wasn't in it, I was actually looking down at it, from my hotel window at 5 a.m., the sky just starting to glow through its dawn colors. From above, the village looked just like a computer circuit board. I remember standing near my window in absolute awe, wondering how life actually moves through something built that dense. Would it feel stifling, closed in on itself, cut off from the rest of the city ten meters away?

Still under the impression from the museum exhibits, I made it to the urban village as evening settled over the city. And it was nothing like what I'd braced for from that rooftop view.

Walking in from the wide boulevards outside, the scale change was immediate. Ground level, the density felt like I had entered a sprawling beehive, completely alive. Delivery drivers threading through on scooters. Tiny shops on every corner, stacked one after another – hairdressers, gaming rooms, someone's kitchen doubling as a noodle stall. People just going about their day, unhurried, with the chitchat in characteristic southern dialect softly trickling around. 

That contrast is the whole point. Urban villages like this one have a complicated reputation – official planning documents tend to flag them for overcrowding and substandard infrastructure, but they're also some of the most genuinely live-in, community-dense parts of the city, the kind of streetlife you don't get in the polished areas of the city like Nanshan or the CBD. 

What surprised me most was the atmosphere. I'd half-expected the usual "urban village" warnings, maybe the overcrowded, slightly-dodgy reputation these places get in guidebooks. I didn't feel any of that. Even in the darkest, narrowest corners, there was no edge to it, no sense of danger. If anything it felt weirdly friendly and more communal than the wide boulevards outside. Standing in Xiangxicun, I had this inexplicable feeling of warmth as the cool wind blew from the dark alleyways. It reminded me of the tighter-knit, more neighborly Armenian communities I grew up in, the kind of place where everyone's business is a little bit everyone's business, in a good way, mostly.

If you ever find yourself in Shenzhen, don't just stop at the city models in the museums or the amazing skyline and the bay. Go find an urban village. Walk into the neighborhoods that made the skyline possible – the beehives that still hum along underneath it. 

(All photos taken by Zaruhi Poghosyan, March 28, 2026.)

Editor's note: Zaruhi Poghosyan is a multimedia editor for CGTN Digital. This article is part of China, Soft Focus – a slow journalism series that offers textured, human-centered glimpses into China through measured pace and intimate storytelling.