Jin Mao Tower

The Jin Mao Tower was the first of the supertall buildings that now crowd the Lujiazui peninsula in Pudong, across the Huangpu River from the Bund, and it is still the most graceful of them. Completed in 1999 to a design by Adrian Smith of the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it rises 420.5 metres to the tip of its spire. Its name translates roughly as "Golden Prosperity Building", and the whole design is built around the number eight, associated with prosperity in Chinese culture: 88 floors, divided into sixteen segments, each one-eighth shorter than the sixteen-storey base, with an octagonal concrete core ringed by eight great composite columns and eight steel ones. It was officially dedicated on 28 August 1998, a date chosen for its eights.

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. Beneath it all are 1,062 steel piles driven more than 80 metres into Shanghai's soft ground, at the time the longest steel piles used for a building on land.

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.

Getting there

The tower stands at 88 Century Avenue in Pudong, Shanghai, close to Lujiazui metro station. Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport (SHA) is about 16.5 km away; metro Line 2 runs from Hongqiao Airport through the city centre to Lujiazui and continues east to Pudong International Airport. Express lifts from the basement carry visitors to the 88th-floor Skywalk.