On Saturday, July 21, I participated in the launch of A General History of Shenzhen (深圳通史) at China’s 28th National Book Expo. We gathered to honor archeologist Zhang Yibin, who has spent over thirty years of his life documenting the shards and towers of Shenzhen. He has contextualized these bits and pieces of material culture within and against local gazetteers and academic research, providing us with a rough timeline of the past 7,000 years. So, now we have an official history that we can begin deconstructing. Who knows? We may actually move beyond the fishing myth and our investment in imagining “normal history” as the history of boomtowns and capitalist accumulation.

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