Did You Know?
From 30,000 to 17 Million in Forty Years
When Shenzhen was designated China's first Special Economic Zone in 1980, it was a county of fishing and farming villages, and its main town had a population somewhere around 30,000. It now holds more than 17 million people.
That is roughly a 500-fold increase inside a single working lifetime — the fastest growth of any large city in recorded history. Its entire bus fleet, over 16,000 vehicles, went fully electric in 2017.
The clock: Shenzhen and Hong Kong sit twenty minutes apart by train and share UTC+8, but crossing between them still means a border, and for decades it meant two different worlds on the same hour.