Travel Notes Jin Mao Tower: A 420.5-Metre Pagoda with Thirteen Tapering Stages
The third pillar of Lujiazui
Construction began in 1994 and finished in 1999, at a cost of about 540 million dollars and some 290,000 square metres of floor area, with three underground levels. Together with the Oriental Pearl and the Shanghai Tower it makes what people call the three-piece set of Lujiazui. When it opened it was the tallest building in mainland China, a title later handed to the Shanghai Tower and the World Financial Center.
The pagoda SOM drew
The American firm SOM in Chicago led the design with Adrian Smith. The structure pairs a reinforced concrete core with a steel outside frame and resists seven-degree seismic loading. The facade narrows in thirteen stages up to the top, drawing into a pagoda outline, which is both form and a phrase about rising step by step. Eight lifts run at 9.1 metres a second to the eighty-eighth floor, about forty-five seconds from the lobby.
The eighty-eighth floor: 340 metres
The observation deck sits 340 metres up over about 1,520 square metres, one of the earliest high-level viewing platforms in the city. There is glass in the floor, and on a clear day the view carries forty kilometres. The south-east corner is the place to stand: the Oriental Pearl and the Shanghai Tower share one frame. Eight lifts at 9.1 metres a second take under a minute from the bottom.
The Grand Hyatt and the lobby
The building holds the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, whose guest rooms climb the upper floors. The ground lobby is tall, stainless steel and glass push the light up to the ceiling, and everyone entering lifts their head without noticing. The deck stays open until ten at night, so you can enter in the evening and collect daylight, sunset and night in one visit.
Comparing the three
Each of the Lujiazui trio keeps its own deck: Jin Mao on the eighty-eighth at 340 metres, the World Financial Center on the hundredth at 474, the Shanghai Tower on the 118th at 546. Seeing them low to high covers every height in one trip, and Jin Mao is among the cheaper tickets of the three. Built in 1999, 2008 and 2016, they are specimens of three consecutive stages of the city.
Choosing an hour
The eighty-eighth opens from 8:30 to 22:00 and costs 120 yuan for adults, with concessions for students and seniors. Entering between five and six in the evening is the best value, since daylight and night come together. Weekends and holidays are crowded; a weekday is calmer. For photographs, stand at the south-east corner, where the Oriental Pearl and the Shanghai Tower appear in the same shot.
What moves people about Jin Mao is not the figure 420.5 metres but the line you see when you look up from the lobby and watch the crown narrow stage by stage — Western structure and Eastern pagoda shape meshing without a seam. Standing at 340 metres and looking down, you understand why the people of Shanghai call it the piece of the trio that first put a Chinese pagoda into the skyline.
Practical information
- Hours: the eighty-eighth floor runs 8:30-22:00; worth confirming before travelling.
- Tickets: 120 yuan adults, concessions for students and seniors, subject to the official site.
- Getting there: metro line 2 to Lujiazui station, exit 2, five minutes on foot; buses 81, 82, 85 and others stop at Lujiazui.
- Timing: entering between 17:00 and 18:00 gives daylight and night together; weekdays are quieter than weekends.
- Photography: the south-east corner of the deck frames the Oriental Pearl and the Shanghai Tower together.
Related reading
Shanghai World Financial Center: the 474-metre observatory
The first of Lujiazui's three towers to top out, 492 metres and 101 floors, opened in 2008. Its observatory on floor 100 sits at 474 metres above a fifty-five-metre stretch of transparent glass floor — the earliest place in Shanghai to leave you hanging in mid-air.
Shanghai Tower: a vertical city at 632 metres
In the heart of Lujiazui, 632 metres tall and 127 floors above ground, fully open since 2016 — China's tallest building and third in the world. The observatory sits at 546 metres on floor 118, a 1,000-tonne damper fills floor 126, and the city's highest bookshop is on 52.
The Bund: One and a Half Kilometres Where Two Centuries of Shanghai Stand Side by Side
The Bund runs from Garden Bridge in the north to Jinling Road East in the south, a little over 1.5 kilometres. Fifty-two buildings of the modern era stand along it, twenty-three of them national protected monuments, and in 1996 the Bund architecture grouping entered the World Heritage list. By day it is red brick and Ionic columns; after dark the whole row sinks into a golden edge while Lujiazui answers from the far bank. Free and open around the clock.
Oriental Pearl Tower: a 468-metre television tower
On the Huangpu in Lujiazui, 468 metres tall and open since May 1995, this was China's first television tower designed and built entirely by Chinese teams. Three observation levels — the space capsule, upper sphere and lower sphere — frame the classic view across the river.
Shanghai: Two Shores of the Huangpu, Foreign Architecture and a Skyline
Shanghai goes by the short form Hu and the old name Shen, sits where the Yangtze meets the sea and belongs to East China. The Huangpu divides the city in two: west, the foreign-built architecture, lane houses and plane-tree streets of the treaty-port years; east, the towers of Lujiazui. From the museum at People Square to the Bund, across on a two-yuan ferry, up to the 546-metre deck of the Shanghai Tower; then turn into the old town for Ming rockeries at Yu Garden, the nine-turning bridge at the City God Temple, or an afternoon in the narrow lanes of Xintiandi and Tianzifang.