Shenzhen

The land Shenzhen occupies has a much longer history than the city. Bao'an county was established here in AD 331, and the walled town of Nantou served as its seat for centuries; Dapeng Fortress, on the eastern peninsula, was built in 1394 to guard the coast against pirates. Hakka and Cantonese clans farmed rice and grew lychees, salt was produced along the shore, and the area's market town, Shenzhen, took its name from the drainage ditches in the paddy fields. When the British leased the New Territories in 1898, the boundary was drawn along the Shenzhen River, and the market town found itself on a frontier.

In 1979 the county was reorganised as a city, and in 1980 it was designated China's first Special Economic Zone, the testing ground for Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Foreign investment, much of it from Hong Kong, built factories at Shekou and across the zone; migrants arrived from every province to work in them, and a fenced internal border separated the zone from the rest of Guangdong until it was abolished in 2010. Deng's southern tour of 1992, which confirmed the reform course, is commemorated by a billboard portrait in the city.

Assembly work gave way to design and research. Huawei, Tencent, BYD, DJI and ZTE grew up here, and the city became a centre of hardware prototyping supplied by the Huaqiangbei markets. Rail links to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, a metro network built from 2004, and the Greater Bay Area plan have tied the delta cities closer together. Shenzhen's growth from a few hundred thousand people to a metropolis within a single lifetime has few parallels anywhere.

Shenzhen is a city almost without natives. The great majority of residents came from somewhere else, most of them as young adults, and the local culture is correspondingly new: Mandarin rather than Cantonese, work-centred, informal about hierarchy and unusually comfortable with change. The city's own slogan describes anyone who comes as a Shenzhener, and there is no long-established local society to join or to be excluded from.

What it has instead is the culture of a young, technical, ambitious population. Maker workshops and prototyping labs, design studios in converted factories at OCT-LOFT, an enormous library and concert hall on the Futian axis, and art districts in old industrial buildings all belong to that. The Bi-City Biennale of architecture, run with Hong Kong, examines the city's own explosive growth. Sport and the outdoors matter too: the hills, the coastal paths and the bay cycleways are crowded every weekend, and Shenzhen is one of the few Chinese cities designed with that much green space.

Older layers survive at the edges. Hakka walled villages, clan halls and the walled towns of Nantou and Dapeng remain, and dozens of urban villages — dense blocks of self-built housing on former village land — are still governed by their old clan corporations. They provide the cheap rooms that newcomers start in, and they are where the city's street food and night life are at their most informal.

About 18.2 million people live in the municipality, on a strip of land between the hills and the sea that is small for such a population; density is among the highest in China, and the median age is unusually young. Most residents are migrants without local household registration, which affects access to schools and some services and keeps ties to home provinces strong.

The economy is technology, manufacturing, trade and finance: Huawei, Tencent, BYD and DJI are headquartered here, the port at Yantian is among the world's busiest container terminals, and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange is one of the country's two main markets. Work hours are long, and the tech industry's schedules are debated nationally. Housing costs are among the highest in China, which pushes many workers into urban villages or into commutes from Dongguan and Huizhou.

The day is organised around the metro and the phone: breakfast bought at a stall or a chain, long working hours, dinner out with colleagues, and parks and waterfronts busy late into the evening when the heat eases. Weekends go to the hills, the eastern beaches or across the border. Typhoon season brings closures and warnings, and the city's own preoccupations are house prices, school places and the pace of work.

Shenzhen eats everything, because its people come from everywhere. The base is Cantonese: morning tea with dim sum, roast meats over rice, congee, steamed fish and slow-simmered soups, all done well in Luohu and Futian. Beside it sit the cooking of Chaoshan — beef hotpot with hand-cut cuts served in strict order, braised goose, oyster omelette and gongfu tea — and Hakka dishes such as salt-baked chicken and stuffed tofu from the villages that were here first.

Then come the provinces: Hunanese chilli-heavy stir-fries, Sichuan hotpot and mala crayfish, Northeastern dumpling houses, Xinjiang lamb skewers and hand-pulled noodles, Wuhan hot dry noodles for breakfast. Whole streets in the urban villages specialise in one region's food, and canteen-style shops feed office workers cheaply at midday. Seafood is landed at Shekou and Yantian, and the standard way to eat it is to choose from tanks and pay for cooking.

The city's other food habit is drinks and sweets: milk-tea chains founded in Guangdong, fresh fruit teas, and dessert houses serving mango sago, tofu pudding and double-skin milk. Lychees remain a local point of pride, grown in the outer districts and sold briefly in June and July. Coffee has spread quickly with the technology industry, and late-night barbecue stalls — skewers, oysters, beer — are where much of the city ends its evenings.