The museum occupies the former government house of Bao'an County — the administrative office of a jurisdiction that, at various points in Chinese history, encompassed the lands that would eventually become Shenzhen and Hong Kong. That lineage gives the building a weight that transcends its modest scale. Two stories tall, it contains three exhibition halls arranged to guide visitors through the region's history chronologically. The structure itself is part of the exhibit: to stand inside this building is to occupy a space where county magistrates once worked, where petitions were received, and where the daily business of governing a coastal frontier was conducted for centuries.

The museum's collection focuses on archaeological and historical artifacts from the former Bao'an County area — stone bricks, ceramics, maps of the ancient city layout, historical records, and reconstructed scenes from daily life. Photographs from the museum's gallery show displays tracing the development of Nantou from its founding in 331 CE through the Ming dynasty rebuilding of its walls in 1394, the turbulent Qing dynasty clearances, and the eventual absorption of the surrounding territory into the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone after 1980. The three halls appear to move from geological and early settlement history through the imperial administrative era and into the modern period of transformation. Maps of the Nantou ancient city — showing the wall circuits, the gate positions, and the street grid — are among the most striking elements.

The Nantou Ancient City Museum is unusual in that it sits within a functioning urban village rather than a preserved heritage precinct. The streets around it are narrow and busy. Residents walk past the entrance on their way to and from work. Small shops and food stalls operate in the surrounding lanes. This proximity to everyday life makes the museum feel less like a curated exception and more like one layer of a place that has been continuously inhabited and continuously remade. The Shenzhen government established the museum as part of a broader effort to revitalize Nantou as a historic trail, renaming the area Xin'an Ancient City. Whether that effort has succeeded in preserving the town's character is a question the museum itself quietly poses.

Chinese local authorities designated the museum as a patriotic education base — a formal category within China's official cultural designation system that signals a site's role in teaching citizens about national and local history. For Shenzhen, a city whose popular image is entirely defined by the past four decades of economic growth, the Nantou Ancient City Museum represents an institutional commitment to remembering what came before the Special Economic Zone. The artifacts on display — salt production records, military fortification remnants, evidence of the imperial administrative machinery — document a place that was already old when Shenzhen was still a village.