The Pearl River Delta in 16 days

Some 86 million people live around the mouth of the Pearl River, in cities that have grown into each other. Fifty years ago most of it was rice paddies and fish ponds. Today it builds a large share of the world’s electronics, and fast trains and ferries tie the whole of it together. You never need a car here.

This is a first trip you could book as it stands: 16 days in a loop around the delta. It starts in Hong Kong, takes the ferry to Shenzhen and spends four days in the city that grew fastest in history. Then it climbs to Guangzhou, comes down the west bank through Zhuhai to Macau, and rides the bridge back over the sea. Each stop ends with a question, and your score is waiting at the end.

Britain took Hong Kong Island in 1842 and leased the New Territories in 1898 for 99 years. When the lease ran out in 1997, the whole territory went back to China under one country, two systems, which lets it keep its own courts and its own currency until 2047. That blend of Chinese and British ways is what makes the city so easy to land in, and around 170 nationalities can visit without a visa.

In 1945 about 600,000 people lived in Hong Kong, and by 1950 it was over two million, as families arrived from across the mainland after the civil war. Shanghai brought its tailors and textile mills, and Guangdong brought its cooks and its Cantonese opera. The newcomers and their children built the city of factories and film studios that Hong Kong became.

Hong Kong has some 260 islands, and around 40 percent of its land is protected country park. The ferry from Central runs out to Cheung Chau, an island of fishing boats and no cars. Swim at Tung Wan Beach, then eat fish balls on the waterfront.

Take the ferry across the bay into the mainland at Shekou. In 1979 China was poor and closed, and its new leader Deng Xiaoping picked this strip of land facing Hong Kong to test markets and foreign money. Shekou opened to outside investors that year, and in 1980 the whole of Shenzhen became China’s first special economic zone.

Futian is the new center the city built from scratch, and for years Shenzhen finished more skyscrapers than any other city on Earth. The tallest is the Ping An Finance Centre, with a deck on the 116th floor. Climb Lianhuashan Park at dusk to watch the towers light up, past the statue of Deng striding forward. For dinner, find a Chaoshan beef hotpot, where the beef is sliced to order and cooked in seconds.

Shenzhen has a coast most visitors never see. Metro Line 8 tunnels under the mountains past Dameisha and Xiaomeisha, two long beaches that fill up with families on weekends. Since December 2025 it runs on to Xichong station, near the beach at Xichong Resort, a different place from Xichong Beach farther down the Dapeng peninsula. Continue by bus to the old fort and have a seafood lunch by the fishing harbor.

The first zone ran only along the coast, behind a fence in the hills with checkpoints on every road. Outside that line, in Bao’an and Longgang, the factories went up, and millions of young workers came from the inland provinces to assemble the shoes and phones the world bought. Today the factories build robots and electric cars, and BYD, the biggest maker of electric cars in the world, has its home next door in Pingshan.

The train runs through Dongguan, past Humen, where in 1839 the official Lin Zexu destroyed more than 20,000 chests of British opium and set off the First Opium War. A century and a half later Dongguan became a factory floor of the world, and Huawei now runs a research campus there with its own little train. The line ends at Guangzhou South, and Metro Line 2 takes you into the old city.

South of the old city, Zhujiang New Town rose on the riverbank in the 2000s, with a long green square running between its towers to the water. At its foot sits the Guangzhou Opera House by Zaha Hadid, two smooth gray stones on the bank. Across the river stands the Canton Tower, slim and twisted at the waist.

Zhuhai is the same experiment as Shenzhen on a calmer scale, a special economic zone since 1980 facing Macau the way Shenzhen faces Hong Kong. Foreign money and open markets, backed by huge state spending on rail and ports, turned a coast of fishing villages into a city of over two million. It is home to Gree, one of the world’s biggest makers of air conditioners, and it often ranks among the most livable cities in China.

Portuguese traders settled in Macau in 1557, and Portugal only handed it back on December 20, 1999. Portuguese is still an official language, so street signs carry both scripts, and the money is the pataca, though Hong Kong dollars are taken almost everywhere. Eat Macanese food, which mixes Portugal and China with spices from the old empire. Macau dropped its tax on wine in 2008, so the shops stock long shelves of Portuguese bottles at prices hard to find elsewhere in Asia.

Gold shuttle buses leave Macau for Hong Kong around the clock over the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, opened in 2018 as the longest sea crossing in the world. Halfway across, the road drops into a tunnel between two artificial islands, so the biggest ships can sail over it and no towers stand in the way of planes landing at Hong Kong.

That was 16 days around the Pearl River Delta, out from Hong Kong’s airport and back to it over the sea, without getting in a car. In two weeks you saw what forty years can do to a coast. The karst peaks of Guilin are three hours away by fast train for the next trip.

Time to see how you did.