In recent years, Shenzhen has not only tried to preserve the city's ancient relics but also those of its recent past.

The city has a history dating back more than 6,000 years, but its most dramatic and glorious past does not merely lie in ancient times.

In May 1980, the city was formally named as the country's first special economic zone by the Central Government to carry out the opening-up and economic reform policies.

But it wasn't until 2001 when the city government decided to set up a relics collection office for the history of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in the Shenzhen Museum to collect artifacts that can help record the city's recent history.

"At the beginning, the collection was only the job of two experts in the museum's research department, but now it has evolved into a social project involving people from all walks of life," said Zhang Long, chief of the relics collection office.

So far, the relics collection office, which now has eight full-time workers, has gathered more than 1,500 artifacts.

The various objects they've collected can be roughly divided into four categories: photographs and documents relating to early leaders, articles of daily use by earlier pioneers including construction and migrant workers, border passes, contracts, land deeds and various equipment from early industries in the SEZ.

Among them, the smallest is a 10-cent ticket for the former Bus 1, then the first and only bus running from east to west through the city, and the biggest is a three-meter-long and 1.5-meter-tall sander, a machine for polishing cloth in the early 1980's.

One of the most valuable in the collection is a minibus, on which late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping toured around the city in 1984.

On learning the Shenzhen Museum was collecting historical relics, the city's traffic police bureau decided to donate the abandoned minibus in August last year.

To restore the minibus, the city's Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital donated a minibus of the same brand and type, which provided more than 80 percent of the parts.

After more than three weeks' repair, the minibus became part of the Shenzhen Museum's permanent collection Aug. 22 last year, Deng's 100th anniversary.

Editor: Catherine