Live cameras in Shenzhen, China

Shenzhen sits on the east bank of the Pearl River estuary in Guangdong, right across the Shenzhen River from Hong Kong. Within living memory it was a cluster of fishing and farming villages; in May 1980 it became the first Special Economic Zone in China, and it has since grown into a city of glass towers, electronics markets and tech campuses, home to companies such as Huawei, Tencent and DJI. The 2020 census counted about 17.56 million residents across roughly 1,997 square kilometers, from the coastal flats of Nanshan in the west to green hills and beaches toward Dapeng in the east.

A plain note about the cameras on this page: none of them are inside mainland China yet. Because Shenzhen is a large city with a wide radius on our map, it picks up the Hong Kong Transport Department traffic cameras across the border, mostly in the New Territories and Kowloon. These are official road cameras that post a small still snapshot, refreshed about every two minutes. The closest ones to Shenzhen watch the roads that lead to the boundary crossings: Kong Sham Western Highway, which runs to the Shenzhen Bay Bridge and the Shenzhen Bay Port, and Heung Yuen Wai Highway, which serves the newest crossing, Heung Yuen Wai, paired with Liantang Port on the Shenzhen side. When those views fill up with trucks and coaches, you are seeing the cross-border traffic that ties the two cities together.

Shenzhen keeps China Standard Time, UTC+8, with no daylight saving. The climate is humid subtropical and shaped by the monsoon: winters are mild and fairly dry, while summers are hot, wet and open to typhoons, with most of the yearly rain falling between late spring and early autumn. Weekday rush hours and the days around Chinese New Year and the October Golden Week holiday tend to bring the busiest border traffic. Autumn and early winter usually give the clearest, most comfortable daylight for watching.

For the wider picture, open our Hong Kong page, which gathers the full network of about a thousand Transport Department cameras, including the harbor tunnels and Tsing Ma Bridge. We hope to add mainland views for Shenzhen itself as reliable public sources turn up.

Sources: Shenzhen - Wikipedia · Hong Kong-Shenzhen Western Corridor (Shenzhen Bay Bridge) - Wikipedia · Heung Yuen Wai Control Point - Wikipedia · Transport Department: CCTV images on the Internet.