The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings in the People's Republic of China
6 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful modern buildings in the People's Republic of China are National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, Shanghai Tower and Jin Mao Tower. The list covers 6 modern buildings. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Few countries have built as much, as fast, as China since the 1990s. Rapid urban growth, opening to the world and the ambition to give its cities an international profile led to a series of open competitions in which foreign and Chinese architects tried out forms that would have been hard to realise elsewhere. The result is a generation of buildings that experiment with height, structure and shape, often in deliberate contrast to the courtyards and walled compounds of the old capitals.
In Beijing two of them stand out. Paul Andreu's National Centre for the Performing Arts, opened in 2007 near Tiananmen Square, is a vast elliptical dome of titanium and glass set in a lake and entered through a passage beneath the water. The CCTV Headquarters by OMA, led by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, makes a skyscraper into a loop: two leaning towers joined by a cantilevered bridge high above the ground.
The Shanghai Tower, completed in 2015, rises 632 metres in a gently twisting spiral and is the tallest building in China. In Guangzhou the Canton Tower narrows to a slender waist as its lattice rotates, and in Hong Kong I. M. Pei's Bank of China Tower, finished in 1990, climbs in a framework of triangles that gives it its crystalline silhouette.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing | Opera house | |
| 2 | Shanghai Tower | Skyscraper | |
| 3 | Jin Mao Tower | Skyscraper | |
| 4 | Canton Tower | Observation tower | |
| 5 | CCTV Headquarters, Beijing | Skyscraper | |
| 6 | Bank of China Tower | Skyscraper |
01 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 There is no conventional front door. Visitors walk down and along a corridor of some 80 metres that passes beneath the lake, with water visible overhead, before emerging into the great lobby under the dome. Inside are an opera hall of just over 2,200 seats, a concert hall of about 1,860 and a theatre of about 1,040, stacked within the shell with their own acoustic envelopes. The building was controversial when it was announced, and it remains a striking contrast with its monumental neighbours — which is exactly why it is worth seeing.
Did you know? Of the more than 18,000 titanium plates covering the shell, only four are said to share the same shape.
More about National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing →
02 Shanghai Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.6 km from Shanghai31.235° N 121.501° E
Ermell · CC0 For visitors, the tower is about the view. The observation decks on the 118th and 119th floors, at 546 and 552 metres, have been fully open since 2017, and a further deck on the 121st floor, at 562 metres, ranks among the highest observation decks in the world. The express elevators that take you there, supplied by Mitsubishi, ran at 20.5 metres per second when they were installed and were for a time the fastest in the world. From the top, even the neighbouring supertalls of Lujiazui lie below you.
Did you know? The tower cost about 15.9 billion yuan, roughly US$2.4 billion, and stands on a plot that was once a golf driving range.
03 Jin Mao Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.7 km from Shanghai31.237° N 121.501° E
Ermell · CC BY-SA 4.0 Inside, the building's great spectacle belongs to the hotel. The Grand Hyatt occupies floors 53 to 87, and its rooms open onto a cylindrical atrium roughly 27 metres across and about 115 metres tall, lined with ring after ring of corridors spiralling upward: one of the tallest hotel atria in the world. From the Skywalk observation deck on the 88th floor you can look straight down into that well, and outward over the Bund, the Huangpu and the towers of the Shanghai World Financial Center and Shanghai Tower beside it. Come after dark, when the whole Lujiazui skyline is lit and the Jin Mao's tiers glow against its taller neighbours.
04 Canton Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.1 km from Guangzhou23.109° N 113.319° E
Image by AndyLeungHK from Pixabay The tower is built to be climbed and looked out from. Through the waist runs the Skywalk, an open-air staircase that starts at 170 m and spirals almost 170 m higher, with glass panels in parts of the floor. The indoor observatory sits about 449 m up, and above it an open roof terrace at 488 m was for a while the highest outdoor observation deck in the world. Around the edge of the roof, sixteen transparent capsules for four to six people travel slowly on a sloping track, taking 20 to 40 minutes to circle the top of the tower, with the city far below.
Did you know? The Sky Drop free-fall ride starts at around 485 metres and plunges 30 metres in under two seconds, a Guinness-recognised height record.
05 CCTV Headquarters, Beijing
People's Republic of China · 5.6 km from Beijing39.915° N 116.457° E
HoweyYuan · CC BY-SA 4.0 Koolhaas described the loop as an expression of collectivity, communication and continuity, and argued that the building was a hybrid that neither China nor Europe could have produced alone. Critics went further, some calling it perhaps the greatest work of architecture of the century, and in 2013 the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat named it the best tall building in the world. It stands in Beijing's Central Business District in Chaoyang, the modern counterpart to the imperial city a few kilometres to the west, where the capital of the Ming and Qing dynasties still centres on the Forbidden City.
Did you know? The building was designed to accommodate around 10,000 workers and is linked directly to the city's underground rail network.
06 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 When it opened it was 315 m to the roof and 367.4 m to the tip of its masts, with 72 floors above ground — the tallest building in Hong Kong and in Asia until 1992, and the first outside the United States to pass the 1,000-foot mark. It also became a textbook case of feng shui debate: the sharp angles and the X motifs were read by some as blades pointed at neighbours and as marks of negation, and the tower earned a nickname meaning "the knife". The crystalline form stayed, and it remains one of the most recognisable shapes on Victoria Harbour, best seen at night from Tsim Sha Tsui or from the Peak, where its lit diagonals stand out from everything around it.
Did you know? Its entire weight is carried down to just four steel corner columns by the triangular trusses of the frame.
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 modern buildings in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing ranks first, followed by Shanghai Tower and Jin Mao Tower.
- What is the tallest building in China?
- The Shanghai Tower in Lujiazui is the tallest building in China at 632 metres. Completed in 2015, it twists as it rises, a shape that helps reduce wind loads.
- Why is the National Centre for the Performing Arts called the Egg?
- Its concert halls are enclosed in a single elliptical shell of titanium and glass that rises from a surrounding lake, giving it the shape of an egg floating on water.
- How many modern buildings are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 6 modern buildings.