Shenzhen

Shenzhen is the fastest city ever built. In 1980 it was a scatter of fishing and farming villages across the border from Hong Kong; designated China's first Special Economic Zone, it became the laboratory of reform — and then the result: a metropolis of many millions, home to Huawei, Tencent, BYD and DJI, the hardware capital of the planet where an idea can become a shipped product in weeks. "Shenzhen speed" entered the language; the average age of the city is famously young, and its institutions — libraries, parks, concert halls — were all built within living memory, which gives the place the peculiar optimism of a city without ruins.

Culture followed the same curve. Dafen village, once a huddle of painters copying old masters for export, became the world's oil-painting workshop and is now growing its own artists; the Shenzhen Concert Hall and a design scene of international rank anchor the centre. The concert record documents the Poly Theatre — the Nanshan district's major stage in the national Poly network — where touring orchestras, opera and dance meet the audiences of a city that treats concert-going, like everything else, as a skill to be acquired quickly and done well.

No dynasties, no city wall, no patience: Shenzhen is the control experiment of Chinese history, and the finding is clear — give forty years and a harbour, and you get a civilisation with Wi-Fi.