Display cabinets like this are/were a staple of the electronics markets. I’m glad they preserved one in a museum because everything is moving online and it may soon be a thing of the past.
A decade ago small coin mining rigs were everywhere. It would not surprise me if a similar AI/LLM rig isn’t coming soon (or already here). This is an LLM rig, but it seems to be aimed at data centers rather than personal use. I’ll get a better pic of the specs next time I’m in the area.
This is a model of the radio tower on the top of the SEG building. It was removed at some point.
One day the entire skyscraper started swaying violently and had to be evacuated. The cause was found to be loose bolts in one of the radio towers that caused the building to resonate in just the right wind conditions. The tower was removed, I believe it was this tower.
A timeline of development from the 1980s through today. This whole area went from muddy swamp to “worlds largest electronics market” in about 10 years.
Can you find your first mobile phone? Besides electronic components, Huaqiangbei has historically been a huge mobile phone, phone accessory and repair market.
The guy at the top is Hans, a hacker camper from Germany who moved to Shenzhen. There’s a bunch of “innovation center” kind of stuff in the market these days. It ranges from foreigner-dominated hacker spaces to locally grown accelerators.
I’ve been collecting material and observations to post. I think have have enough to do one or two a day for the next several weeks. Stay tuned! Next up lets explore the explosion in eBikes and delivery.
First purchase! A power bank with the magsafe (?) magnet attachment. Charges wirelessly, but also high speed via the USB cable in the handle.
The back side has a display that shows the charge level, and a stand that swings out to hold the phone upright for watching TV or whatever.
There are two versions: 5000mAh and 10000mAh. I got 5000 because it’s so tiny and portable, but I strongly suspect the battery is well over rated. I’d guess it’s closer to 2500mAh. It gives about 1.5 full charges on a galaxy phone (with a severely aged battery).
100rmb (15USD).
Next I want to get a USB charging tower so one power outlet can handle all my phones, accessories and the framework laptop. I’m having a real issue with not enough outlets in hotels.
same for CCC events. the hint to bring a power strip to those events got a reason. a 4-table long section at a recent event managed to require 8 powerstrips even though we didnt sit with maximum density therre
I don’t sleep well on planes and have found that it gets a lot worse once I go past ~18 hours, which is more of a concern with the less and longer flights. As I wrote before, on the last trip I slept at an airport hotel in Beijing. Not something I would unconditionally recommend, but something to experiment with if you can’t find other good flights. Could also probably be done through Bangkok.
Didn’t notice Hans on the smiling face wall , but saw on WeChat stories that he was in Shenzhen for the last Maker Faire.
Since I didn’t have a local phone number, I wasn’t able to try the delivery much, so I look forward to your experience. It is sort of interesting how you can sometimes chat with the seller, delivery company, and delivery guy directly. Getting in the habit of ordering Luckin Coffee slightly in advance of walking by to pick it up is pretty fun. Especially for the one in the subway or the one that is inside one of the markets.
Random notes on the bikes to explore. The brakes often seem louder than the bikes. The ramps under Shennan Middle Road can be a bit wild. The guys in red vests that are rearranging the parked bikes. The food runners at the intersections in HQB at lunchtime. The delivery guys and girls in sometimes oversized jackets have an Akira vibe.
I think there are a half dozen Chinese companies (the big tech companies and some startups) working on GPUs for LLMs, so one would think at some point they would find their way into a DGX Spark-style workstation.
This is a modified version of the Chinese universal socket. Usually it’s 3in1, but this is 2in1+. The plugs lost all ability to hold the contacts and only one outlet works. Hope the tower of power can help with the situation.
Caffeine doesn’t agree with me, so I don’t have a horse in the race. However jins issue is that there are so many luckins and kotte coffees that he usually orders from the wrong one and we spend 30 minutes wandering around street level, underground, and upper floors to find the one that has his order
it’s 8 meters away so it must be the one next door. No, it’s the one in the metro directly under the building. They don’t have numbers either, so you have to ask every shop in the area.
For me, it just wouldn’t select the right one in the first place, and when I did, it would prompt, “You are far from this store; are you sure you want to order from it?”. I was thinking this was because of the GPS offset on Google Maps, but the location would look correct, so I don’t know.
Luckin Coffee stores do usually have a store number at the bottom of the counter to confirm with the first time. Though I remember there being some quirk where you also couldn’t always see it in the mini-program (like it is in one view but not the other). I ended up ordering to the wrong one at least twice anyway since there are around 6 of them within a few blocks in HQB
Shenzhen has had electric mopeds for a long time, but they were heavy, clunky and expensive. “Share bicycles”, manual bicycles you can rent via an app, were the choice of delivery drivers and casual users. Now it seems e-bikes have exploded onto the scene.
I find it fascinating that there is actual bicycle infrastructure. Two-way, separated bicycle lanes/routes throughout the Huaqiangbei area. It’s approaching what we have in the Netherlands, without the comprehensive design aesthetic and dedicated signaling.
This one is outside the cell phone repair school, for those who have been.
However it seems like the majority of riders still choose to ride in the street (or sidewalk). I imagine over time this will change if the network is further built out and road rules are enforced.
Delivery apps are a staple, in fact I haven’t found a grocery store besides Wall-mart on this trip. Sometimes the drivers get really overloaded, and the market has evolved to fill that gap. The driver here is handing off orders to an auntie who will do the “last mile” delivery by foot. She charges a percentage of the driver’s earnings for the orders delivered.
I didn’t see many normal grocery stores either. I did find a number of fancy ones. There is one in City Mall where AEON used to be. A Hema Fresh (Freshippo) south of Walmart. And a Tianhong Sp@ce supermarket in the Rainbow department store west of HQB Plaza hotel.
The New York Times did an article on the food runners, but it didn’t really resonate with me until I saw it in person. Pretty cool photo you got of the handover. So much going on.
There are at least two wholesale eyeglass markets in the Dongmen area - Glasses World and Glasses City. I am an absolute sucker for any wholesale market, not just electronics, and I’m a huge fan of this one.
Glasses World feels a bit more trendy and kooky compared to Glasses World, it’s always my first stop. If you came to any of the pre-hacker camp tours, this is the market we visited.
As you would expect - tons and tons of frames. There’s a lot of “copies” avaible, but also local brands. The copies tend to be really inexpensive (~$10 frames), while the local brands are generally much more expensive (~$100+). This case is full of Bolon, a local brand that is super popular at the moment.
This style is called “eyebrow glasses” in Mandarin. The vast majority of young people wearing glasses have this style, it’s what all the celebrities and pop stars wear.
This is a different domestic brand (PRSR) version of Bolon’s most popular style. I bought PRSR because it was a fraction of the price of Bolon and looked nearly identical.
The top most floor is my favorite part of the market - the lens makers. Buy your frames and then head upstairs to have lenses installed. The rep who sold you frames will usually do this, and it’s cheaper to have them do it, but I enjoy the process and experience.
The lens floor has been cleaned up a LOT since my last visit. The lens grinding machines used to be out in the open, just spitting glass dust onto a growing mountain on the floor. In the third pic you can see the guy has a ciggie dangling from his mouth, despite being cleaner it still has some authenticity.
Most of the component stands on the bottom floor are gone, replaced with consumer electronics. Hot items at the moment: wireless headphones, personal fans, power banks and AI language translation devices.
Second floor is largely abandoned. This has been slowly happening for years, but probably accelerated during covid and the supply chain crisis that followed. As everything moves online there isn’t much value in keeping an small expensive booth and an awkward offsite warehouse in the surrounding residential apartments.
Top floor has always been computer stuff, but the mix has drastically changed. It’s almost all used RAM, CPUs, SSDs and older spinning hard disks. The exorbitant increase in RAM and storage prices caused by the AI/LLM bubble has created a huge secondary market for older used hardware.
The shopping bag is full of used RAM modules the woman is trying to sell in bulk. This stuff usually gets pulled from e-waste by mom and pop type operations. They used to do it on the sidewalk and leave the unwanted shells/motherboards behind, but I haven’t see that this trip.
Next up: HuaQiang Building #2, “the LED building”.
The middle floors are consumer electronics retail. I got a few decent shots of the product mix. Smart watches, wireless headphones and personal fans absolutely dominate right now.
There was a large 3D printing area but it seems to have fallen out of fashion. The market is more and more retail as component sourcing moves online.
The LED floor is really underwhelming. It was so dazzling in the past that the air conditioning couldn’t keep up with the heat pumped out from all the LEDs. There’s a few LED strip samples here and there, but I didn’t see a single shop selling panels for giant outdoor displays.
There are some 3D printers, together with some drones and SenseRobot/Unitree-style robots, in one of the buildings directly east of the pedestrian street (which doesn’t say much, but for reference).
The markets that I found to have changed the least are the cell phone markets. Both the market with the tool brothers in it and even more so the market one or two buildings going south on the road where the McDonald’s restaurant and Mechanic store are.
My first longish trip to Shenzhen I used the squat toilet in that McDonalds and everything in my pockets fell out into the squatter. Faced with a dilemma, I flushed three times and bid farewell to my keys, some cash and a hotel key card.
Ian I can’t thank you enough for this tour. I never had strong enough memories to document the change. It must feel a little sad, it does for me but perhaps you are not the nostalgic type.
When I visited last year the number of cell phone case stores was driving me crazy. There are hundreds of stores selling for cell phone cases. It seemed to me that most of the buildings north of Seg on that side of the road were all cell phone case stores.
I’m curious where you’re staying, obviously your post after you leave. I stayed at hqb plaza for the first time and quite enjoyed it. I’m getting old and soft.
I hope to hear your views on Depu. The area around it has changed dramatically but the market itself has not. It does feel very dusty and a bit quiet though. Surely if the area is full of residents now, the factories that used to be their customers have moved out as well.
Thanks for following along! We’re typhoon adjacent at the moment so it’s a bit spicy out
We did the first week at a hotel in an abandoned mall very near the market. It was brand new, but the bed was up in a loft. I kept hitting my head on the ceiling getting into bed and was terrified of falling down the steep rickety stairs in the dark, so we moved into a hotel back in the 'hood. We plan to come back for 4-6 months this winter when the weather is nicer, and we think we have a line on a brand new serviced apartment complex in a good location. Will post all when we are outta here.
It’s nostalgic-sad to see the market dwindling, but we’re part of the “problem” too because we rarely use the market for any of our production. Ultimately I think it’s better for vendors as the market was always a bit complicated. Sometimes we had to wait in a half an hour long line to get an elevator to the 60th floor of a residential apartment to get a reel of something from a booth’s warehouse. Imagine the runner kids doing that umpteen times a day, and I totally get why we just courier stuff now from outside the market now. The apps make it all possible.
Also, there’s a whole proper tourism aspect to it now, not just for us soldering fiends. So many foreign families enjoying all the consumer electronics stuff. Kind of a more wide spread appeal rebirth right in the central business district, which is probably a good thing.
My goal is to spot the evolution. What’s hot. What’s new. What’s up and coming. Where it might be going. What we might do with that. It gets me over the nostalgia hump.
You’re totally right about the accessories markets, but that was already well under way when I left in 2019. It was sad then as well, but at least all the dodgy cosmetics wholesale is gone from SEG.
, but saw on WeChat stories that he was in Shenzhen for the last Maker Faire.
