In a half-square-kilometre warren on the edge of Shenzhen, painters copy Van Gogh and Monet by the thousand. At its peak Dafen made around two-thirds of the world's oil paintings — and the whole thing was started by one man.
Dafen is a dense knot of lanes in Buji, in Shenzhen's Longgang district, barely four-tenths of a square kilometre. The first thing you notice is the smell of linseed oil and solvent; the second is the canvases, stacked floor to ceiling, while painters copy Starry Night or a Monet pond at a speed that looks impossible until you see three of them doing the same picture at once. At its height this single village produced somewhere between sixty and seventy percent of all the oil paintings on Earth.
There is a real founder here, which makes Dafen unusual. In 1989 a Hong Kong art dealer and master copyist named Huang Jiang moved a team of about a dozen painters across the border into what was then a poor Hakka farming village. Hong Kong rents were rising; Dafen was cheap, and it sat right at the gateway of the new Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, just outside the "second line". Huang kept the shipping and the orders in Hong Kong and the brushwork in Dafen, and built something genuinely new: an assembly line for art.
The method was division of labour applied to a canvas. One hand blocks in skies, another does foliage, another only ever paints Van Goghs; a picture moves down a line of specialists the way a phone moves down an assembly bench. The output flowed out through Hong Kong to furniture stores, hotels and decor wholesalers across Europe, North America and Australia, at prices a Western studio could never touch. There is a fitting accident in the name: da Vinci's Chinese rendering, Dafenqi, opens with characters almost identical to Dafen.
From the late 1990s the local government saw a "cultural industry" worth tidying. It paved the lanes, raised a giant easel-shaped sign and a bust of da Vinci, and later built the 20,000-square-metre Dafen Art Museum; the village became a National Cultural Industry Demonstration Base, and was formally absorbed into the expanded SEZ in 2010. The chaotic copy-shop had become a brand.
The reproduction trade was fragile, and the 2008 financial crisis exposed it: Western demand collapsed, costs rose, and cheap prints and print-on-demand undercut the hand-painted copy. Dafen's answer was to climb from copying toward authorship — hundreds of painters now sell original work, alongside the domestic market and a brisk tourist trade. The wider point is sharp. Where Zheng'an, Songxia and Foshan industrialised the making of objects, Dafen industrialised creativity itself, then ran into the same wall every Chinese cluster meets, and is now trying to climb from copy to original. It is the value-chain story of the whole country, told in oil paint.