Bryan in Hong Kong

Thursday we made a day-trip to Shenzhen, the boarder town just next to Hong Kong. Sun Zhe needed to mail some things back to Shanghai (cheaper from Shenzhen), I wanted to buy some Chinese language books, and Jin Gu just came along for food and fun.

If you’re looking for books in Shenzhen, Book City is the place to go. It’s a brand new mall with a variety of stores, including a separate foreign language book store, an art and design bookstore, a huge music store, and a gigantic Chinese bookstore (named something like “Book Experience”). The last one is the place to go if you’re looking for Chinese language instruction books. They have a great selection of material. I ended up buying the last two books in the series that we used at Purdue, along with some specialty book like “IT Talk” (ever wonder how to say ‘I’ve read your blog today, and left a message there’ in Chinese?).

I bought six books and two sets of CDs for a totol of 310 RMB (US$40). What a great deal. The selection was much better than anything I’ve seen in Hong Kong. For some reason, the HK bookstores seems to only stock books printed by HK presses (which are expensive, and don’t have a great selection–perhaps because not many people are learning Mandarin in HK), whereas the ones in Shenzhen had a full selection of mainland press material (which are really inexpensive).

To get to Book City, take the Number 4 line of the Shenzhen metro to Shao Nian Gong. You can’t miss it when you exit the station.