Longgang

Longgang district, in the east of Shenzhen, was part of the historic Bao'an County before the SEZ's expansion and retains a stronger connection to the pre-1980 Guangdong rural landscape than the city's western districts. The dominant indigenous group is the Hakka — a Chinese Han subgroup whose ancestors migrated south from central China during various dynastic upheavals and settled in the hill country of eastern Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangxi, maintaining a distinct language and cultural identity.

Crane Lake Wai (Hehu Wai), located in the Longgang district interior, is the most significant Hakka heritage site in Shenzhen. The wai — an enclosed walled settlement — contains a large rectangular compound with corner towers, a central ancestral hall, and a semicircular band of surrounding building that follows the feng shui principle of the crescent and its mirror. The settlement has been occupied continuously since the Qing dynasty and retains several hundred residents. The ancestral hall is maintained for festivals; the surrounding buildings are a mixture of original fabric and twentieth-century modification.

The Hakka domestic architecture visible at Crane Lake and similar walled villages across the district reflects a combination of security concerns (the walls and watchtowers were functional defences during the turbulent migration period) and geomantic principles. The enclosed community form enabled a level of self-sufficiency — wells, storage, agricultural processing — that supported isolation during periods of external threat.

The district's large migrant worker population from inland provinces has created, somewhat ironically, a demographic inversion: the indigenous Hakka, once themselves migrants into Guangdong, are now a minority within a district reshaped by a new generation of internal migration.