This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. For more stories from WIRED's China issue, click here.
Just 35 years ago, this was little more than a fishing town. "Shenzhen is a young city, but it's become a huge metropolis," explains Beijing-based photographer Jonathan Leijonhufvud, who visited the vast electronics markets of the city's Huaqiangbei subdistrict for WIRED in January. "It's largely 80s office towers and, in most cases, the first three storeys are a shopping mall," he says. "The ground floor is mayhem, with hundreds of tiny booths crammed with semiconductors, capacitors, microchips and fuses."
Outside, Huaqiangbei's pavements are choked with perhaps its most notorious product, the two-wheeled "hoverboard"; overhead, the skies teem with street-vendor-controlled drones. Go up a storey, and things change. "It really dies down," says Leijonhufvud.
.
Besides components, the famous "shanzhai" products -- an imitation branded exterior, with a variable mix of non-brand components inside -- are in abundance. "You have markets dedicated to smartwatches in the strangest combinations of shapes and colours," says Leijonhufvud. "A lot is just junk. But the flipside is there is a massive amount of recycling. The second-hand market is really strong."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
