Taipei 101
Interesting facts
- In January 2026 Alex Honnold climbed the outside of the tower without ropes in about an hour and a half, in an authorised free solo.
- When it opened, its Toshiba elevators were the fastest in the world, climbing from the 5th to the 89th floor in 37 seconds at about 60 km/h.
- It held the title of world's tallest building from 2004 until the Burj Khalifa opened in 2010.
- During construction in March 2002 an earthquake toppled two cranes from the 56th floor, killing five people.
- The tower stands on 380 piles, each 1.5 metres wide, driven about 80 metres into the ground.
- French climber Alain Robert scaled the facade on Christmas Day 2004 in about four hours, with permission and safety ropes.
- In 2011 it received LEED Platinum certification, then a rare distinction for a supertall building.
- Designed by C.Y. Lee and C.P. Wang, it rises 508 metres over 101 floors, with five more levels below ground.
- The roof of the adjoining mall is shaped like a giant ruyi, a traditional Chinese talisman symbolising fulfilled wishes.
Why it is worth it
The single most photographed part of Taipei 101 isn't visible from the street. Between the 87th and 92nd floors hangs a bright yellow steel sphere weighing 660 tonnes — the largest tuned mass damper ever installed in a building, and one of the few designed to be seen rather than hidden. It's suspended on cables like a giant pendulum; when wind or an earthquake pushes the tower one way, the ball's inertia keeps it lagging behind, and hydraulic pistons bleed that relative motion off as heat, cancelling out a meaningful share of the sway before it ever reaches the people inside. After a 2015 typhoon made the ball swing hard enough to be filmed swaying nearly a metre, the building's operators leaned into it rather than downplaying it, giving the damper a cartoon mascot and its own gift shop.
The tower's shape isn't just aesthetic bamboo-inspired styling — it's structurally load-bearing symbolism. The building rises in eight repeating segments, each one flaring slightly outward as it climbs before tapering back in, echoing the swelling joints of a bamboo stalk. Eight is a number associated with prosperity in Chinese numerology, and the choice to build the tower from eight visually distinct stacked modules rather than one smooth extrusion was as deliberate as the engineering underneath it, meant to read as auspicious to the building's occupants and to Taipei's skyline alike.
The real test came on 3 April 2024, when a magnitude-7.4 earthquake — the strongest to hit Taiwan in twenty-five years — shook central Taiwan and rattled Taipei sharply enough to send other buildings' contents crashing to the floor. Taipei 101 came through unscathed, and footage of the damper ball visibly swinging inside its viewing gallery during the quake, doing exactly the job it was installed for, spread well beyond Taiwan as a rare piece of structural engineering caught performing live rather than just modeled on paper.
Getting there
4 km from Taipei. Taipei Songshan International Airport (TSA) is about 4 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- National Palace Museum 7.8 km · museum
- Yehliu Geopark 24.1 km · rock-formation
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Taipei 101, formerly known as the Taipei World Financial Center, is a 508-meter, 101-story skyscraper in Taipei, Taiwan. It is owned by the Taipei Financial Center Corporation. It was officially classified as the world's tallest building from its opening on 31 December 2004, until it was surpassed by the Burj Khalifa in 2009. As of 2026, it is the tallest building in Taiwan and the eleventh tallest in the world.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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