Each February, the world’s largest annual human migration takes place in China.
For the Spring Festival, hundreds of millions head home to welcome the lunar new year.
Others spend the nine-day vacation sightseeing.
It is hard, sometimes, to encompass the vast scale of Shenzhen’s ambition. A vast, easy to navigate metro system. Pocket parks surrounded by high-rises. Hong Kong and Macau to the south. The city that shipped the iPhone. The world’s fastest place to go from a concept sketch to breakneck-pace production.
This year, 9.5 billion journeys were taken for the Chinese New Year. Myself, I arrived early on a Saturday, the eve of the official nine-day public holiday. Arriving from Bangkok, the clean air and EV-driven quietude was a pleasant change.
First stop: the 2026 Shenzhen Spring Festival Flower Fair. I tried Chinese olive juice (related more to incense trees than Mediterranean olives). It is sour, but damn refreshing.
The flower fair was packed to the gunnels with punters. It comprised two avenues filled with blossoms, lilies, red-waxed amaryllis bulbs, laden kumquat trees and bright decorative gourds.
I could go on. Supposedly, many visitors were from Hong Kong as the new year flower tradition is strong among the Cantonese.
It was a balmy 28°C, so next stop was Cuizu Park. It was nearly deserted but for a great many tabby cats. Huichi Pavillion sits atop a lush hill, perfect for enjoying the grand orange sunset from a gap in towering bamboo. For dinner, a plate of dumplings. I had a Chinese burger too. Not entirely unlike the New Zealand variety, it comprises of a meat filling stuffed into flaky pastry.
This Overseas Chinese Town is a quintuple-A rated tourist attraction. Think Cuba Street vibes: pedestrian and dog friendly, filled with sculptures, murals, coffee shops, wine bars and art galleries. Gee Coffee has an impressive selection of roasts. At Jooin restaurant, the noodles are nice, if the service slightly chaotic.
At sunset, we went to Window of the World. For an amusement park made up of downsized replicas of all Unesco’s wonders, I was expecting the very worst. In an attempt at dispassionate criticism, I will say that the inconsistent scaling principals were certainly disorienting. Indeed, there was something of a fever dream quality to the entire experience.
At times, post-modern life is too bizarre to countenance. Which is to say, all that hitherto gratuitous entertainment paled before the immaculately choreographed Egypt show affront the faux pyramids of Giza.
Ever wondered where you might get to watch a neon-lit Pharaoh dance to hyper-pop, aside a writhing Roman centurion followed by space aliens and a grooving Anubis? As a bonus, you will be wished a happy new year in Chinese by a projected lip-synching sphinx, glitching bursts of digital noise out and in of focus, like a fluttering palate of cleft pixels. The pyrotechnics too, were outstanding.
Suddenly, a tremendous rattling, like a gigantic sheet of corrugated tin being ridden over by a tractor towing a compactor filled the narrow streets. In fact, it was a great cloud of firecrackers being thrown outside the ancestral shrine of a local family, a type of cleansing ceremony, which was followed by the sharing of roasted pork on the street. A pleased (and a confused) looking Western tourist snagged a piece.
While the village tended towards the commercial and derivative side of art, Spark gallery was noteworthy for its selection of contemporary abstract art and tasteful interior design. Regrettably, their cafe was closed; fortunately, I survived an encounter with an angry Bichon Frise in the stairwell.
Back in Futain district, accommodated in a plastic surgery clinic building, we brought the new year in via an expansive Hainan-style coconut chicken hotpot in an otherwise deserted mall. Delicious, but book ahead. From the balcony, fireworks went up all over the skyline and continued for a long time past midnight.
For the second day of the new year, a visit to Talent Park in Nanshan. There was an impressive retrospective of recently deceased British photographer Martin Parr. The China Resources Headquarters building is almost the city’s highest, shaped like a towering bamboo shoot (or a very pointy gherkin, depending on your perspective).
The park was packed with families enjoying the day. A drone delivery station, with a 40-minute queue, quadcoptered in iced tea from beyond a distant skyscraper .
That night, fireworks again continued into the small hours.
Thursday meant yet more walking. In lieu of a potentially inauspicious trip to the haunted village of So Lo Pun in Hong Kong, we took the high speed train to Gungzhou, home of the White Cloud Mountain minnow. I love the fast train. It is comfortable, clean, whisper-quiet and takes about 1.5 hours at a cost of 70 RMB ($NZ17).
We spent an hour waiting in line for dim sum at the Luck Win Tea house (delicious) and mistakenly paid admission for both Yuntai garden (gaudy) and Yunluo Botanic Gardens (exquisite).
Baiyan (aka White Cloud) Mountain is another top-ranked 5A attraction. It’s a splendid walk once you get past the shrill hordes of children playing bird calls on slide whistles. We started around 3pm and made it all the way round and to the packed summit by sunset, past signs warning “snake infestation, please pay attention to safety”.
There is one more thing I wish to say about Shenzhen: you can buy a remote control quadcopter drone in the vast tech malls of Huaqiangbei for 100 RMB. I did not believe it myself, but it’s true.
And a post-script: As far as I could see, there was not a single indication of the fire epithet attached to the ever-present iconography of the new year’s horse anywhere I went in Shenzhen. Curious.
