Zhuhai is the Pearl River Delta city that decided to grow slowly, and the contrast with Shenzhen — its fellow Special Economic Zone, designated the same year, just across the estuary — is instructive. Where Shenzhen went vertical and dense, Zhuhai spread out along a coastline of 146 islands, kept its population relatively low, and became the cleanest, greenest, and most livable of the Delta's boom cities. The United Nations gave it an award for best practices in environmental management in 1998, which sounds like bureaucratic praise but is in this context genuinely earned. The Lovers' Road, a coastal promenade stretching along the waterfront, offers views across to the Macau skyline that are considerably more photogenic than anything on Macau's own overcrowded waterfront.
The city's geography is defined by its relationship with Macau, which lies immediately to the south, separated by a land border crossing at Gongbei that is one of the busiest in the world. The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, opened in 2018, has added another connection to the mix: at 55 kilometres it is the longest sea-crossing bridge-tunnel system ever built, and driving across it at dusk, with the Delta spread out in every direction, is a genuinely impressive experience even if the bridge itself is partly tunnel. Zhuhai is, in practice, the most convenient base on the Chinese side for anyone spending time in Macau.
Chimelong Ocean Kingdom, on the western edge of the city, claims to house the world's largest aquarium and is one of the most visited theme parks in China. It is emphatically a theme park rather than a conservation institution, but it is spectacularly executed, and the whale shark enclosure — a tank so large that the sharks turn in lazy circles against a window the height of a three-storey building — has a scale that is difficult to ignore. The New Yuanming Palace, a reconstruction of the Qing-dynasty garden complex destroyed by European forces in 1860, is a more complicated attraction: vast, technically impressive, and slightly melancholy in the way all reconstructions are.
Zhuhai's food scene benefits from proximity to both Hong Kong and Macau and from access to the seafood of the South China Sea. The local specialty is grilled oysters, cooked over charcoal at roadside stalls that stay open late, and the fishing village areas on the outer islands retain a scruffier, saltier atmosphere than the manicured waterfront of the main city.