Beyond the Old Line: the Stations, the Hakka Walled Villages and the Oyster Coast

A village of about 0.4 sq km in Buji where you can stand in a lane and watch people paint. It started in the late 1980s when copyists clustered here and a market formed; the district government stepped in after press coverage in 1998, and it became one of China's first National Cultural Industry Demonstration Bases and has been a China Cultural Industries Fair sub-venue every year since 2004. Since 2019 it has been cleaned up and since 2022 partly re-developed by a commercial operator. Dafen Art Museum at the heart of it is free, closed Mondays, and shows real exhibitions. The lanes are workshops, not galleries: the point is the work in progress, not the finished thing on the wall.

The clearest surviving picture of what Shenzhen was before 1979: a fortified Hakka clan compound begun in the Qianlong era by Luo Ruifeng, a Hakka from Xingning, with the main structure finished in 1817. It covers about 25,000 sqm in three parts - crescent pond, threshing floor and the walled compound itself - 166 m across the front, 116 m at the back, 104 m deep, two rings, one inside the other, with corner towers and a lookout tower on each ring and close to 400 rooms. The district calls it one of the largest surviving Hakka compounds in the country. It became the Longgang Hakka Folk Customs Museum in 1996, is a provincial protected monument, and is free.

The seafront half-day nearest the airport. Binhai Culture Park, the public part, runs along the Bao'an waterfront and is open 6:00-23:00 free of charge, divided into a cultural middle, an art east and a sports west with a skate park, a children's area and a beach. At the eastern end stands Bay Glow, a 128 m Ferris wheel with 28 imported cabins holding 25 people each and one turn taking about 30 minutes - that part is ticketed and run by the operator, not the city. The whole complex was rated a national 4A tourist area in December 2024. There is a water-and-light show and a musical fountain in the evening; the park is free, the wheel is not.

A square Hakka fortress at Pingshan with more than 400 rooms, begun around 1763 by Zeng Chuanzhou and finished by 1791, still intact and still holding the hydraulic works built with it. The city calls it one of the largest square Hakka compounds in the country by ground area and the largest mid-Qing Hakka compound surviving in Shenzhen. It was listed as a city monument in 1984 and a provincial one in July 2002, restored in 2017, and named one of Shenzhen's ten featured cultural blocks in 2018. Part of it is now run as a Pingshan city reading room. The clan's Lunar New Year ancestral rite, Dawan Jizu, is on the city intangible heritage list.

Officially this is 'Gankeng Ancient Town', and the district culture bureau counts it among Shenzhen's ten ancient villages; what you walk through today is a rebuilt Hakka-themed town, and its showpiece, Fenghuanggu, is four Hui-style (Anhui-style) old buildings rather than local Hakka houses. The district describes it as a 180,000 sqm project at Gankeng village in Jihua, Longgang, developed on a 'culture plus tourism plus technology' model on the back of Gankeng liangmao - the Hakka woman's fringed sun hat, a provincial intangible heritage craft - which was turned into an animation IP called Xiao Liangmao with a VR park, a picture-book competition, themed hotels and a children's farm. It is rated 3A by the city, listed in 2022. Entry to the streets is free and the paid attractions inside are separately ticketed. Metro Line 10 has a station called Gankeng.

A Hakka village at Dashuitian in Longhua that was kept and turned into a printmaking base rather than demolished - planning began in 2006 and the base was named at the China Cultural Industries Fair in May 2007. It is free and open, and it is the quiet counterpart to Dafen: original printmaking rather than reproduction painting. Over 900 artists from more than 90 countries have worked here and printed 80,000-odd prints, with 37 studios and galleries in residence. The site exists because the printmaker Chen Yanqiao, a first-generation figure in China's modern woodcut movement who learned under Lu Xun, came from Niuhu village next door.

Shenzhen's west coast farmed oysters before Shenzhen existed. Shajing was planting stakes in the shallows by the Song dynasty, and a Northern Song poem about this coast is China's earliest written record of oyster farming; the production customs - the three-zone method of spat, growth and fattening grounds, the work songs, the tide-set working day - were listed as a Guangdong provincial intangible heritage item in 2022. The Shajing Oyster Culture Museum, built by the subdistrict and opened during the sixth Golden Oyster Festival on 21 December 2009, is the museum for it: 1,200 sqm of grey brick and timber built in the style of an old oyster-town house, 600 sqm of galleries and over 500 objects, free, closed Mondays. The oyster-shell walls of the old villages are close by, the best-known at Buyong.

One of the two Shenzhen ports where the 240-hour visa-free transit actually works - the other is Shekou cruise port; every land crossing from Hong Kong is outside the scheme. Terminal 3 opened in 2013 with 451,000 sqm of floor space, and a satellite concourse of about 240,000 sqm opened in December 2021, reached by an automated people mover. The one metro line that stops at the terminal is Line 11, whose entrance is inside the GTC ground transportation hall. There is a 24-hour bilingual 'Service Centre for Overseas Visitors' just east of the international arrivals exit, with five counters for payment, tourism, SIM cards, transport cards and immigration questions. Tax refund on departure is handled at gates 308-309 in the international departures hall, 9:00-21:00.

The fourth of Shenzhen's four stations, and the one you are most likely to end up at by accident. It began as Buji railway station and was rebuilt and renamed Shenzhen East on 21 December 2012: four platforms, eleven tracks, sharing a hub with Buji metro station on Lines 3, 5 and 14. Under the July 2026 timetable it runs 60 conventional departures a day - long-distance trains in the Guangzhou-Kowloon and Beijing-Kowloon directions, starting and terminating here - against 848 high-speed departures at Shenzhen North. Nothing here is aimed at a visitor; it is on this page because a ticket that says 'Shenzhen East' is not a ticket to Shenzhen North, Shenzhen station or Futian.

The station for the rest of China, and the one most people mean when they say 'the high-speed station'. It sits in Longhua where the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong and Xiamen-Shenzhen lines meet: built from October 2008, finished in December 2011, 180,000 sqm, a roof 410 m east to west shaped to read as a dragon's head. Under the July 2026 timetable it runs 848 high-speed departures a day against 246 at Shenzhen station and 216 at Futian. It has two squares that behave differently: metro, buses and taxis on the east, ride-hailing and private cars on the west - Lines 4, 5 and 6 all reach the east square, 4 and 6 above it and 5 below. For Hong Kong West Kowloon, both Futian and Shenzhen North have direct trains (fastest 18 minutes from here); Futian is closer to the city centre.