The tallest building in Beijing is CITIC Tower, known as China Zun, at 528 metres with 108 floors, completed in 2018. It stands in the central business district of Chaoyang, and it is likely to hold the record permanently: since 2018 Beijing has capped new buildings in the CBD at 180 metres, and China introduced a national ban on buildings over 500 metres in 2021. China Zun was the last supertall Beijing will build for the foreseeable future.
Shaped Like a Wine Vessel
The building's popular name comes from the zun, a ritual bronze wine vessel used in Shang and Zhou dynasty ceremonies, which flares at the top and bottom and narrows in the middle. The tower reproduces that profile: wide at the base, pinched at around the 60th floor, and flaring again towards the crown.
The design is by TFP Farrells with Kohn Pedersen Fox, and the shape is functional as well as symbolic. The wide base gives the structure the footprint it needs for stability, the narrow waist reduces the surface exposed to peak wind loads, and the flare at the top recovers floor area on the most valuable levels.
The exterior is a diagrid — a diagonal steel lattice carrying both gravity and lateral loads — clad in glass, which is why the facade reads as a woven pattern rather than as a grid of columns and spandrels.
Engineered for Earthquakes
Beijing sits in a seismically active region, and the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, about 150 kilometres east, killed at least 240,000 people. China Zun was designed for a magnitude 8 event.
The structure combines a reinforced concrete core with a steel megaframe of eight composite columns tied by the diagrid and by belt trusses at intervals up the height. The foundation is a mat around 6.5 metres thick over some 200 piles reaching about 40 metres down.
Construction of that mat set a record: around 56,000 cubic metres of concrete poured continuously over 93 hours in 2013, one of the largest continuous pours in the world at the time.
Six Years, and a Tower Crane Problem
Construction ran from 2011 to 2018. The tower topped out in August 2017 and the diagrid steelwork — around 140,000 tonnes of it — was erected using four internal climbing cranes that jumped up the core as it rose.
Cranes are the limiting factor on supertall construction schedules. Above about 400 metres a hoist cycle takes long enough that the number of lifts per shift falls sharply, and wind stops work more often. China Zun's contractors used a construction platform system, an enclosed self-climbing deck that shields the working floors and allows work in conditions that would otherwise halt it.
The site is also directly above two subway lines, which constrained where loads could be transferred and required continuous monitoring of the tunnels during excavation and piling.
The Nickname Problem
Beijing's landmark buildings all have unofficial nicknames, and the official ones rarely stick. The CCTV Headquarters is the Big Pants; the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Paul Andreu's titanium dome in a lake beside Tiananmen, is the Egg; the Beijing National Stadium is the Bird's Nest; and the National Aquatics Center is the Water Cube.
China Zun is the rare case where the nickname is also more or less the official name — the tower is marketed as China Zun and the CITIC Tower name is used mainly in corporate documents.
In 2016 President Xi Jinping publicly criticised what he called weird architecture, and the State Council issued guidance the same year directing that new buildings be suitable, economical, green and pleasing to the eye, and discouraging oversized, xenocentric and bizarre designs. The era of foreign architects producing landmark experiments in Beijing ended at roughly that point, and China Zun — designed years earlier and conventional in silhouette by comparison — was among the last of the big commissions.
The Height Caps
Beijing has capped building heights across most of the city for decades to protect views of the Forbidden City and the historic axis that runs north to south through it. Within the second ring road, heights are held at 45 metres or less in many areas, and the flat character of central Beijing is a deliberate policy outcome.
In 2018 the city extended controls to the CBD, limiting new construction there to 180 metres. That came a few months after China Zun completed, and it means no future Beijing tower will approach it.
The national restriction followed. In 2020 and 2021 China's housing ministry and national development commission issued rules banning new buildings over 500 metres outright and requiring central approval for anything over 250 metres, citing safety, cost and what the guidance called vanity projects. The rules effectively ended China's supertall boom.
What Beijing Has Instead
The CBD around Guomao holds the rest of the city's tall buildings. The China World Trade Center Tower III reaches 330 metres, the Fortune Financial Center 265 metres, and the Yintai Centre 249 metres.
The CCTV Headquarters, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren for OMA, is the most discussed. Completed in 2012, it is only 234 metres tall but is a continuous loop of two leaning towers joined by a cantilevered overhang, which required a structural solution with no real precedent. It is universally known in Beijing as the Big Pants.
Its neighbour, the Television Cultural Centre, burned to a shell in February 2009 after fireworks set off by CCTV staff for Lantern Festival ignited the facade. One firefighter died and the building was rebuilt over the following years.
The Axis and the Old City
Beijing's central axis runs 7.8 kilometres from the Yongdingmen gate in the south through Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and Jingshan to the Drum and Bell Towers. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2024.
Protecting sightlines along and across it is the primary reason for the height restrictions in the centre. The Forbidden City's tallest structure, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, is about 35 metres, and the whole imperial complex depends for its effect on being seen against sky rather than against towers.
Beijing's city walls were demolished in the 1950s and 1960s to make way for the second ring road and the subway, a decision the architect Liang Sicheng argued against at the time and which is now generally regretted. The height controls are, in part, a late compensation for that.
China's Tallest Buildings
China Zun is the tallest building in Beijing and roughly the ninth tallest in the world. Within China it is behind the Shanghai Tower at 632 metres and the Ping An Finance Center in Shenzhen at 599.1 metres.
China holds around half of the world's 100 tallest buildings, and it built more supertall towers between 2010 and 2020 than the rest of the world combined. Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Tianjin, Nanjing and Chongqing all have buildings above 400 metres.
The Goldin Finance 117 in Tianjin, topped out at 596.5 metres in 2015, was left unfinished for years after its developer ran into difficulty and is a standing example of the problem the 2021 rules were written to address.
What Is Inside China Zun
The tower holds offices across most of its height, with CITIC Group — the state-owned conglomerate that developed it — as anchor tenant. There are 101 lifts, and the building has around 437,000 square metres of floor area.
An observation deck occupies the upper floors at around 500 metres, and the crown holds mechanical plant. Total construction cost was reported at around 24 billion yuan.
The site is small for a building of this size, at about 11,478 square metres, which is one reason the tower is as slender as it is and why the diagrid was chosen — it puts the structure on the perimeter and frees the floor plates.
Beijing's Air and Its Windows
Air quality shapes how these buildings are used. Beijing's PM2.5 levels have improved substantially since the 2013 action plan, with annual averages falling by more than half, but heavy pollution episodes still occur in winter.
Office towers in the city run high-specification filtration as standard, and observation decks publish visibility forecasts because on bad days the view is a few hundred metres. The photographs of China Zun that circulate most widely are the ones taken on clear autumn days.
The improvement is largely the result of relocating heavy industry out of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, converting coal heating to gas, and restricting vehicle use. It is one of the fastest urban air quality improvements ever recorded.
Visiting
China Zun is at Guomao, served by Line 1 and Line 10 of the Beijing Subway. The observation deck operates on limited hours and has been closed for extended periods.
The most reliable views of the tower are from the CCTV Headquarters area, from the elevated walkways in the CBD, or from Jingshan Park in the centre, where the hill behind the Forbidden City looks south over the imperial roofs with the CBD towers on the horizon.
That view — yellow tile in the foreground, glass eight kilometres away, nothing in between — is the clearest single statement of Beijing's planning policy. For comparison, see the tallest building in Shenzhen and religion in China.