Yantian: Wutong Mountain, the Meisha Beaches and Chung Ying Street

Shenzhen's free public beach: about 1.4 km of sand on Dapeng Bay, backed by hills, run by the district as a city park and open 07:00-23:00. It was one of the city government's ten projects for residents in 1999, was wrecked by Typhoon Mangkhut in 2018 and rebuilt from 2019; today it covers about 20 hectares, with three footbridges, four small gardens, the Wishing Tower on Fengxin Square and the row of seven winged-figure sculptures at the east end. 'Treading the waves at Meisha' is one of Shenzhen's eight official views. It is also exactly as busy as a free beach an hour from the city centre by metro would be: more than 120,000 people went in on the first day of the 2026 May Day holiday.

Shenzhen's highest mountain and its only national scenic area: 42 sq km of forested ridge across Luohu, Yantian and Longgang, open 06:00-19:00 and free to walk. The main peak, Da Wutong, is 943.7 m; Xiao Wutong (692 m) carries the Shenzhen TV tower and the hilltop square, and on the mountainside below the main peak is the 1.1 km Haohan Slope, the stretch everyone remembers the next morning. From the top you look down on the city on one side and across Dapeng Bay and the Shenzhen River to the hills of Hong Kong's New Territories on the other. It is a proper climb, not a park stroll - three to four hours up by the longer routes - and the reason most people come is the view on a clear day and, in March and April, the pink Rhododendron moulmainense in the Azalea Valley below Xiao Wutong.

A free 19.5 km walking and cycling path along Yantian's whole coast, from Sha Tau Kok in the west to the Beizaijiao headland in the east, rebuilt after Typhoon Mangkhut and fully reconnected in 2020 when the last 600 m cantilevered section past the seafood street opened. It runs in three stretches: the town waterfront at Sha Tau Kok, with the hills of Hong Kong across the water; the industrial port, where you walk past the cranes of Yantian's container terminals; and the natural shore through Dameisha and Xiaomeisha beaches to the Beizaijiao lighthouse. The walkway sits on the sea side with a separate cycle lane above it, and there are four small seaside libraries along the way. Do it in pieces: the eastern end, Dameisha to Beizaijiao, is the prettiest and has metro at both beaches.

A street under 250 metres long and less than 4 metres wide with the boundary between Shenzhen and Hong Kong running down its middle, marked by granite stones the Hong Kong government set in 1905. It exists because of the 1898 lease of the New Territories: on 18 March 1899 British and Qing officials surveyed the land border here and split the village of Sha Tau Kok in two, and people began building houses and stalls along the line. After 1978 it became famous across China as a place to buy Hong Kong goods, and that is still what most visitors do. The boundary stones are a national protected monument; the street also holds the Chung Ying Street History Museum, a banyan over 130 years old whose roots are in Shenzhen and whose branches hang over Hong Kong, and the village of Shalanxia, home of the Sha Tau Kok fish-lantern dance. The whole 0.18 sq km area is a border special management zone: you need a one-day permit to go in, and every published channel for that permit is written for mainland Chinese residents.

A four-storey local-history museum at the end of Chung Ying Street, beside boundary stone No. 1 and the Warning Bell, that tells how a Hakka market village became a street split between two jurisdictions. It opened on 1 May 1999, is run by the Yantian district culture bureau and has been free since March 2008. The permanent exhibition, 'A Century of Chung Ying Street', runs in four galleries: the Hakka settlers who came down from the hills, the Opium War and the leasing of the New Territories, war and border control, and reform and the 1997 handover. The district puts the floor space at 1,688 sq m, and the museum says the exhibition drew 839,000 visitors in 2024. The catch is location: it sits at the far end of the street, inside the Sha Tau Kok Border Special Management Area, so whether you can see it depends entirely on whether you can get the permit for the street.

A hillside resort above Dameisha built by the OCT Group and opened in stages from July 2007: two theme valleys, a forest railway, golf and hotels, spread over nearly 9 sq km of hills. The city lists it as a 4A scenic area (2014). What matters now is that half of it is shut. Knight Valley (Daxiagu), the lower valley with the rides and the lifts up to the Cloud Tribe hilltop, stopped trading at 18:00 on 29 April 2025 for a rebuild; phase one was due back for National Day 2025, but in late April 2026 the resort's own phone line told a reporter it was still closed and could not say when it would reopen, and phase two on the hilltop is scheduled for 2027. The upper area stays open: Tea Stream Valley, the forest train, a hilltop park, a jungle adventure playground and an evening market.

The other Meisha beach, two kilometres east of Dameisha and run on the opposite model: fenced, ticketed and managed by a state-owned developer, Tefa Xiaomeisha, as part of a new resort district. The beach reopened in 2024 after years of rebuilding and was renamed Xiaomeisha Seaside Paradise in June 2025. Behind it, the rebuilt Xiaomeisha Sea World opened for its trial season on 1 October 2024: a 6.02-hectare site, five exhibition zones including polar, tropical and cetacean halls and the Qinglan Cave hall, with what the district calls China's largest cylindrical tank, beluga, polar bears and walrus, and a dolphin theatre. Since 28 June 2025 one Sea World ticket also lets you onto the beach. Paying keeps the numbers down, which is the whole point for most people who choose it over Dameisha.

A row of about ten seafood restaurants on the waterfront of Yantian's old market town, each in a two- or three-storey building with tanks of live fish, shrimp, abalone and shellfish out front and a sea-view terrace on top. The street was laid out in the mid-1990s - a city government page lists it among Shenzhen's eight designated food streets - and it is where Shenzhen people have gone for 'a seafood dinner by the sea' for thirty years. You pick your seafood live from the tanks, it is weighed, and the kitchen cooks it the way you ask. The 600 m cantilevered section of the Yantian coastal boardwalk runs right along the front, so it is the natural place to eat if you are walking the coast or coming down from Wutong Mountain on the Yantian side.