The rebuilt Huanggang Port began operating at 6.30am on Monday, restoring round-the-clock passenger clearance between Shenzhen and Hong Kong at what its builders describe as the largest land border-crossing complex in the world.
The crossing has been in service since 1989 and is the only one between Guangdong and Hong Kong that clears passengers 24 hours a day. The renovation took seven years. Shenzhen's government covered the design and construction costs, according to Hong Kong's Chief Executive, John Lee Ka-chiu.
In its initial phase the port is expected to handle between 50,000 and 100,000 passenger trips a day, China Daily Hong Kong reported. Daily capacity is projected to rise from 50,000 trips to 200,000, and in the longer term to 300,000. The port will eventually connect with five rail transit lines.
The headline figure is the clearance time. Passengers are expected to pass through in about five minutes, against roughly 30 minutes before, because the new building uses a co-location arrangement under which Hong Kong and mainland checks happen in one queue on one set of documents.
The Standard reported earlier this month that the Immigration Department had opened registration for the automated lanes, of which the port has 134, alongside 68 traditional staffed counters, and that the department expected registered travellers to clear the border in about 20 seconds.
Speaking at a commissioning ceremony on Sunday, Shenzhen's Party Secretary, Jin Lei, said the project offered a new approach to aligning cross-boundary rules and integrating the mechanisms behind them. Mr Lee thanked the Guangdong and Shenzhen governments and called the refurbishment a landmark project of Shenzhen-Hong Kong cooperation, consistent with the 15th Five-Year Plan.
Huang Chuping, chairman of the standing committee of the Guangdong Provincial People's Congress, said he hoped the port would become a benchmark for modern international ports. Xue Huaming, a division director at the Shenzhen municipal government's office of port of entry and exit, said authorities would coordinate to keep operations smooth at peak hours, and described a one-stop service centre and translation devices for travellers from overseas.
Guangdong has 50 Class I ports of entry, about a sixth of the national total, and they handle more than 70 per cent of passenger and vehicle trips between the mainland and Hong Kong. The province's trade has ranked first nationally for 40 consecutive years and accounts for more than a fifth of the mainland total.
What has actually been constructed here deserves a closer look. Seven years of work have been exchanged for 25 minutes per traveller, and the two quantities can be compared directly, because both of them are time.
Seven years is approximately 3,681,000 minutes. At 25 minutes saved per crossing, the port repays its own construction period after about 147,000 crossings. At the upper end of the initial phase's 100,000 trips a day, that is a little over 35 hours.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has therefore classified Huanggang Port as a net producer of time. On the 200,000-trip projection it generates five million minutes a day, which is nine and a half years, which means the facility manufactures roughly one human lifetime every eight days.
This raises the obvious administrative question, which is whose time it is. The minutes are created at the border by the joint efforts of two jurisdictions, and are released into the possession of whichever traveller happens to be standing in the automated lane when they appear.
No duty is levied on them. Nothing on the declaration form covers the import of 25 minutes, and the one-stop service centre has no counter for it. The world's largest land border crossing is also its largest untaxed source of spare afternoon.
There is one consolation for the revenue authorities. At 20 seconds a traveller, nobody is in the building long enough to be asked.