Everyone has heard the phrase “If you’re here, you’re a Shenzhen person.”

But behind this slogan lies a hard-hitting truth: in this city, there’s a group of monks in flip-flops. They don’t chase big factories, but they hold Shenzhen’s founding equity.
Many people think Shenzhen became rich overnight from a fishing village—yet that’s not the case.
Over 260 clan villages are active here, like 260 super nodes that have never stopped upgrading.
For example, the Huai De Pan Clan, which built a clan ancestral hall in the Yuan Dynasty, relies on a 700-year family mechanism that has turned the community’s net assets up by 7,031 times over 39 years. This kind of return—more than a hundredfold—isn’t down to luck, but to hardcore early investment.
Roll the clock back to 1980, when the Special Economic Zone was just getting started and no one dared to invest. It was these clans that bet their ancestral property on the fate of the country—clearing out ancestral halls to make conference rooms, turning ancestral homes into dormitories, and providing guarantees for foreign capital. Back then, more than 60% of enterprises took root in villages; they were the first batch of angel investors.
This kinship-based clan system is, in fact, the most primitive form of a DAO. In the early days of the market, contracts might fail, but the names on the family genealogy can’t be erased. If you want to start a business but you’re short on funds, go back to the ancestral hall—Uncle Gong will brew a pot of tea, and the money will be raised. This is a lineage-based currency that’s more solid than any legal document.
Today’s Shenzhen: skyscrapers are the face, ancestral halls are the inner substance.
What’s strongest about Shenzhen isn’t just the speed of making money—it’s the perfect fusion of a thousand-year cultural lifeline with modern commerce. The memorial tablets in those ancestral halls have long had long-termism carved into their very bones.