The Most Beautiful Buildings in the People's Republic of China
11 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful buildings in the People's Republic of China are Terracotta Army, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing and Forbidden City. The list covers 11 buildings. Last updated 14 October 2026.
China builds on two very different traditions at once. The older one is the imperial timber hall: a raised stone platform, red columns, interlocking bracket sets and glazed tile roofs, arranged along a strict north–south axis so that a whole complex reads as a single ordered city. The newer one is the building boom of the last three decades, when Chinese cities commissioned towers, theatres and libraries from the boldest architects in the world and gave them sites and budgets that few other countries could offer.
The first tradition is here in the Forbidden City, the palace of the Ming and Qing emperors in Beijing, and in a far older imperial project: the Terracotta Army near Xi'an, ranks of life-size clay soldiers buried to guard the tomb of the first Qin emperor and found by farmers digging a well in 1974.
The second fills the rest of the list. Paul Andreu's National Centre for the Performing Arts rises as a titanium and glass dome from an artificial lake beside Tiananmen Square, and the CCTV Headquarters by OMA folds a skyscraper into a leaning loop. The Shanghai Tower twists as it climbs to become the country's tallest building, the Canton Tower narrows to a waist in a lattice of steel, and in Hong Kong I. M. Pei's Bank of China Tower is built from triangular prisms. Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House, MAD's white Harbin Grand Theatre in the wetlands of the Songhua River and the terraced bookshelves of the Tianjin Binhai Library show how far the theatre and the library have travelled.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing | Opera house | |
| 3 | Forbidden City | Palace | ✓ |
| 4 | Shanghai Tower | Skyscraper | |
| 5 | Jin Mao Tower | Skyscraper | |
| 6 | Canton Tower | Observation tower | |
| 7 | CCTV Headquarters, Beijing | Skyscraper | |
| 8 | Tianjin Binhai Library | Library building | |
| 9 | Guangzhou Opera House | Opera house | |
| 10 | Harbin Grand Theatre | Opera house | |
| 11 | Bank of China Tower | Skyscraper |
01 Terracotta Army
People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by artemtation from Pixabay What makes the find keep giving up new detail is that no two soldiers are alike. Heads were sculpted separately from the mass-produced bodies, which let craftsmen vary hairstyle, facial features, ear shape and expression figure by figure across a workforce of thousands — more than 8,000 figures are believed to exist in total, of which just over 2,000 have been excavated from three pits so far, leaving an estimated 6,000 still underground.
Did you know? Legs were built much like terracotta drainage pipes, and heads, arms and torsos were made separately before assembly.
02 National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 0.9 km from Beijing39.903° N 116.384° E
Aurelio Asiain from HIrakata-shi, Osaka, Japan · CC BY-SA 2.0 The numbers explain the effect. The dome is about 212 metres long, 144 metres wide and 46 metres high, clad in more than 18,000 titanium plates, with a seam of over a thousand panels of ultra-clear glass running down the middle like a curtain being drawn apart.
Did you know? Its steel frame alone weighs some 6,750 tonnes.
More about National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing →
03 Forbidden City
People's Republic of China · 1.6 km from Beijing39.916° N 116.391° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
N509FZ · CC BY-SA 4.0 The layout is a rectangle about 960 by 750 metres, surrounded by a moat 52 metres wide and a wall almost 8 metres high, with elaborate corner towers. Roughly 980 buildings survive, all laid out along the north-south axis that still structures central Beijing, running from Tiananmen through the palace to Jingshan Park.
Did you know? Its pillars were whole logs of precious nanmu wood brought from the jungles of southwestern China.
04 Shanghai Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.6 km from Shanghai31.235° N 121.501° E
Ermell · CC0 The design is by the American firm Gensler, with a team led by the Shanghai-born architect Jun Xia. The building is really two towers in one: an inner stack of nine cylindrical buildings, 128 floors in all, wrapped in a separate outer glass skin that twists through 120 degrees as it rises. The twist cuts wind loads on the tower by about a quarter, which saved a quarter of the structural steel a conventional design would have needed.
Did you know? In 2022 Guinness World Records recognised its 120th-floor restaurant, at about 556 metres, as the highest restaurant in a building.
05 Jin Mao Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.7 km from Shanghai31.237° N 121.501° E
Ermell · CC BY-SA 4.0 The result reads as a modern pagoda. Instead of a sheer glass prism the tower steps back in rhythmic tiers that quicken as it climbs, so the silhouette narrows in an almost organic taper towards the spire. The curtain wall of glass, stainless steel, aluminium and granite is overlaid with a lattice of aluminium tubes that gives the surface a fine, shifting texture as the light changes.
06 Canton Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.1 km from Guangzhou23.109° N 113.319° E
Image by AndyLeungHK from Pixabay It is the second-tallest tower in China and one of the tallest free-standing structures in the world. The main body is 450 m high and the antenna adds another 150; inside are TV and radio facilities, restaurants including a two-storey revolving one, gardens, cinemas and exhibition spaces.
Did you know? The tower weighs about 100,000 tonnes, of which the antenna mast accounts for roughly 1,550 tonnes.
07 CCTV Headquarters, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 5.6 km from Beijing39.915° N 116.457° E
HoweyYuan · CC BY-SA 4.0 The design came from Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, who won an international competition — with a jury that included Arata Isozaki and Charles Jencks — and signed the contract on 1 January 2002. Cecil Balmond of Arup led the engineering, a formidable task in an earthquake zone. Construction began on 1 June 2004.
Did you know? On 9 February 2009, fireworks set off during the Lantern Festival set fire to the neighbouring Television Cultural Center, killing one firefighter.
08 Tianjin Binhai Library
People's Republic of China · 25.4 km from Lunan39.016° N 117.681° E
Muzzleflash · CC0 The building was designed by the Rotterdam architects MVRDV, led by Winy Maas, together with the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute. Its outer volume was fixed in advance by a masterplan from the German firm gmp for the Binhai Cultural Center, a group of five cultural buildings by different architects, so the designers turned the drama inward.
Did you know? MVRDV's terraced shelves were conceived as interior topography: the same steps serve as bookshelves, seats, stairs and routes up through the atrium.
09 Guangzhou Opera House
People's Republic of China · 5.7 km from Guangzhou23.117° N 113.317° E
圍棋一級 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The project began with an international competition in 2002 that drew detailed designs from Coop Himmelb(l)au, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. Hadid's scheme was declared the winner in November 2002, construction began in January 2005, and the house opened on 9 May 2010 with a production of Puccini's Turandot. 38 billion yuan.
Did you know? The exterior is clad in thousands of custom-cut triangular granite panels and glass panes fixed to an intricate steel space frame.
10 Harbin Grand Theatre
People's Republic of China · 8.2 km from Harbin45.807° N 126.579° E
Jeremy Thompson from Los Angeles, California · CC BY 2.0 The skin is made of smooth white aluminium panels that curve without a single hard edge. Paths are cut into this surface, so visitors can walk up the outside of the building as if climbing a hillside; at the top an open-air stage doubles as a lookout over the wetlands and the city beyond.
Did you know? MAD's Cultural Island master plan treated the opera house, a cultural centre and the surrounding Songhua wetlands as a single landscape.
11 Bank of China Tower
People's Republic of China · 3.8 km from Hong Kong22.279° N 114.161° E
LN9267 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building is a square in plan, divided diagonally into four triangular shafts. As the tower climbs, the shafts end one after another at different heights, so that each face changes profile and only a single triangular prism reaches the top. The result is a silhouette that shifts as you walk around it, from a slender blade to a stepped cluster of glass planes.
Did you know? It was the only major Hong Kong building of its era to skip consulting feng shui masters before construction, and Pei toned down some X shapes before building began.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful buildings in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Terracotta Army ranks first, followed by National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing and Forbidden City.
- Who designed the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing?
- The French architect Paul Andreu. The building, opened in 2007, is an elliptical dome of titanium and glass set in an artificial lake, which is why it is nicknamed the Giant Egg.
- What is the tallest building in China?
- The Shanghai Tower in Pudong, completed in 2015, at 632 metres. Its outer glass skin rotates as it rises, which reduces wind loads on the tower.
- When was the Terracotta Army discovered?
- In 1974, when farmers digging a well near Xi'an broke into one of the pits. The army was buried with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, in the late 3rd century BC.
- How many buildings are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 11 buildings.