The tallest building in Shenzhen is the Ping An Finance Center at 599.1 metres with 115 floors, completed in 2017. It is the second tallest building in China after the Shanghai Tower and among the five tallest in the world. It was designed to reach 660 metres and was cut back before completion, and it now sits nine-tenths of a metre below the 600-metre line — a margin that is not an accident.
The Missing Sixty Metres
The original design by Kohn Pedersen Fox included a 60-metre antenna spire that would have taken the tower to around 660 metres, making it one of the tallest buildings in the world at the time.
The spire was removed during construction. The stated reason was airspace: Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport lies about 30 kilometres west, and the aviation authority raised concerns about the structure's effect on flight paths and radar.
Without the spire the tower tops out at 599.1 metres, which put it fourth in the world when it completed. Whether the height was also trimmed to stay under a symbolic threshold has been speculated about and never confirmed.
Forty Years From Fishing Villages
Shenzhen had a population of around 300,000 in 1979, spread across a county of villages and market towns opposite Hong Kong. It was designated China's first Special Economic Zone in 1980, and its population is now well over 17 million.
Nothing in the modern world has grown faster. Shenzhen went from having no tall buildings at all to having more skyscrapers above 200 metres than any other city on earth — over 180 of them, more than New York and Hong Kong combined.
The Shenzhen International Trade Center, completed in 1985 at 160 metres, was built at a rate of one floor every three days, a pace that became a national slogan — Shenzhen speed. It was the tallest building in China when it opened.
Ping An Finance Center
The tower is the headquarters of Ping An Insurance, one of China's largest financial groups, and stands in the Futian central business district. It holds offices, a conference centre and a shopping podium, with a total floor area of around 380,000 square metres.
Its facade is clad in stainless steel, which is unusual at this scale and gives it a distinctly different appearance from the glass towers around it. Eight tapered steel megacolumns run the full height, meeting at the top in a form the architects described as a chamfered spire.
The foundation goes down through granite to a depth of around 33 metres, and the tower uses 33 double-decker lifts among more than 30 lift shafts. Its observation deck, Free Sky, sits on the 116th floor at around 550 metres and was the highest in China when it opened.
The Building That Wobbled
On 18 May 2021, the 355-metre SEG Plaza in Futian began swaying visibly while occupied, and thousands of people evacuated. Video of the shaking circulated widely, and the building was closed indefinitely.
There was no earthquake, no unusual wind and no visible structural damage. Investigators eventually attributed the vibration to a combination of wind, subway operations beneath the site and the resonance of the building's antenna mast, which was later removed.
The incident was one of the triggers for China's tightening of supertall regulation later that year, and it remains one of the very few cases of a modern skyscraper being evacuated for movement with no external cause.
China's 500-Metre Ban
In 2021 China's National Development and Reform Commission prohibited new buildings over 500 metres outright and required special approval for anything over 250 metres, alongside a general ban on buildings over 100 metres in cities with populations under three million.
The reasoning given covered fire safety — most fire services cannot reach above about 100 metres externally — construction quality, energy use and the financial exposure of local governments that had underwritten landmark towers.
The effect was immediate. Several announced Chinese supertall projects were cancelled or redesigned shorter, and the pipeline of buildings over 500 metres worldwide has thinned considerably as a result. Ping An Finance Center is likely to remain Shenzhen's tallest indefinitely.
Typhoons Set the Design Case
Shenzhen sits on the South China Sea coast and takes several typhoons a year. Typhoon Mangkhut in September 2018 brought sustained winds above 160 kilometres per hour to the Pearl River Delta and produced widely circulated footage of towers swaying across Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
Wind, not earthquake, governs structural design here. Ping An Finance Center was tested in wind tunnels at several institutions, and its tapered profile with chamfered corners is a wind-mitigation measure — rounding or cutting the corners of a tall building can reduce across-wind loading by a third or more.
The tower carries no tuned mass damper. Its stiffness comes from the megacolumn and outrigger system rather than from added mass, which is a different engineering philosophy from Taipei 101's and reflects the difference between designing for wind and designing for earthquake.
The Buildings That Were Cancelled
Shenzhen has a longer list of abandoned supertall projects than most cities have completed ones. The Shenzhen H700 Science and Technology Tower was announced at 700 metres and never started. The Hanking Center at 358.9 metres was built; several neighbours of similar height were not.
The 2021 rules ended the largest of them. Projects that had reached design stage were required to resubmit under the new height limits, and a number of local governments quietly withdrew approvals rather than seek central sign-off.
The change is visible in the global statistics. Completions of buildings above 300 metres worldwide peaked around 2019 and 2020 and have fallen sharply since, and the fall is almost entirely accounted for by China.
The Rest of the Skyline
Shenzhen's other tall buildings are numerous rather than exceptional. The KK100 reaches 441.8 metres, the China Resources Headquarters — known as the Spring Bamboo Shoot — 392.5 metres, and the Shenzhen Center Financial Tower 388.1 metres.
The towers concentrate in three districts: Futian, the administrative and financial centre; Luohu, the older commercial district next to the Hong Kong border crossing; and Nanshan, the technology district that holds Tencent's headquarters and much of the electronics industry.
Tencent's Seafront Towers in Nanshan, completed in 2017, are only around 250 metres but are joined by three sky bridges and are among the most-studied recent office buildings for their circulation design. Huawei, by contrast, built a campus in Dongguan modelled on European towns rather than a tower.
Why Shenzhen Builds This Way
Shenzhen's land area is around 2,000 square kilometres, a large share of it protected mountain and coast, and the buildable area was largely used up by the 2010s. The city has been redeveloping its own urban villages — the dense informal settlements that grew on former village land — for two decades.
Land in China is leased rather than owned, and local governments raise a substantial share of revenue from land sales, which creates a direct fiscal incentive to maximise development intensity. That is the underlying mechanism behind most of China's tall building boom.
Shenzhen also has no historic centre to protect. The city that existed before 1979 has almost entirely been built over, which removed the constraint that shapes Beijing, Paris or Rome.
Shenzhen and Hong Kong
The two cities are separated by a river and a border, and their skylines face each other. Hong Kong's tallest building, the International Commerce Centre, is 484 metres — well below Ping An Finance Center — but Hong Kong has more buildings above 150 metres than any other city in the world.
Shenzhen's economy overtook Hong Kong's in nominal GDP around 2018. The two are now planned together as part of the Greater Bay Area, along with Guangzhou, Macau and six other cities, a region of around 86 million people.
The border remains real. Shenzhen operates under mainland law and Hong Kong under the Basic Law, currencies and legal systems differ, and crossing requires documents — which is why two cities that are physically continuous have developed entirely separate property markets and entirely different skylines.
The Shenzhen Bay and Futian crossings carry tens of millions of passages a year, and the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link connects the three centres in under an hour.
Visiting
Ping An Finance Center is at Shopping Park station on Shenzhen Metro Line 1, in the middle of Futian. The Free Sky observation deck on the 116th floor is reached by a dedicated lift from the podium.
The lifts run at up to 10 metres per second and the ride takes under a minute. The deck looks north over Futian, west to Nanshan and the bay, and south across the Shenzhen River to Hong Kong's New Territories.
The Free Sky deck was closed for an extended period after 2021 and has reopened with capacity limits, so checking before travelling is worth the effort. Tickets are timed and the deck is busiest in the hour before sunset.
Lianhuashan Park, a hill in the middle of Futian with a statue of Deng Xiaoping at the top, gives the best free view and looks straight down the axis to the tower. For comparison, see the tallest building in Beijing and the count of countries in Asia.