Famous Landmarks in Shenzhen
A skyline built almost entirely since the 1980s, when a fishing county became a boomtown.
Shenzhen's skyline is concentrated in a handful of central districts and almost entirely recent: nothing here predates the late twentieth century. Its tallest structures are supertall office and mixed-use towers clad in glass and steel, built in successive waves as the city competed for height records — Shun Hing Square held the national record briefly in 1996, before the Ping An Finance Centre, completed in 2017, became Shenzhen's tallest at 599 metres. Alongside these commercial towers stands a large government complex built as the centrepiece of a planned civic district, its axis stretching two kilometres between a hill and an exhibition hall. The result is a city whose architecture reads less as accumulated history than as compressed, deliberate growth.
Ping An Finance Centre
2017 · Kohn Pedersen Fox
A sheer glass shaft of 115 storeys rising 599 metres — one of the five tallest buildings in the world — with a shopping mall, hotel and conference centre stacked into its lower floors.
The Ping An Finance Centre is a 115-storey supertall skyscraper designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox in a postmodern idiom and completed in 2017. At 599.1 metres it is the tallest building in Shenzhen, the second-tallest in China after the Shanghai Tower, and the fifth-tallest in the world. Beyond office space, it contains a hotel, a conference centre and a high-end shopping mall, combining several functions within a single supertall structure rather than standing as a purely commercial tower.
Photo: Dinkun Chen (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Shun Hing Square
1996
A slender 384-metre office tower, plain beside its taller neighbours, notable chiefly for the sheer height that let it outstrip every other building in the country for about a year.
Shun Hing Square is a 384-metre skyscraper completed in 1996. On completion it became the tallest building in China, a record it held for roughly a year until Guangzhou's CITIC Plaza surpassed it in 1997. It is built as a tower block combining office and other floors. No architect is recorded for the building in available sources, though it remains one of the milestones of Shenzhen's early skyscraper boom.
- It is also widely known by a second name, Di Wang Tower.
Photo: Dinkun Chen (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Shenzhen Civic Center
2004 · John Ming-Yee Lee
A large government complex whose design draws on traditional Asian architectural themes, forming the centrepiece of a masterplanned civic axis rather than standing as an isolated building.
The Shenzhen Civic Center is a government building designed by John Ming-Yee Lee and completed in 2004 at a cost of CNY 2.172 billion. It was the centrepiece of the Futian Central District master plan, sited on a two-kilometre axis running from Lianhua Mountain in the north, through the Civic Center, to the Exhibition Center in the south. Its design is described as attentive to traditional Asian themes and traditions, within a planned district covering roughly a hundred city blocks.
- The surrounding master plan's projected floor space was described as five times the size of the original World Trade Center towers.
Photo: Dinkun Chen (CC BY-SA 4.0)
History
Until 1979, Shenzhen was a largely rural area on the border with Hong Kong. Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up policies made it China's first special economic zone in the early 1980s, drawing foreign investment and migrant workers on a scale that turned the settlement into a city within a decade. That compressed growth produced a skyline built almost entirely from scratch: Shun Hing Square, finished in 1996, briefly stood as the tallest building in the country. Continued expansion produced the Shenzhen Civic Center in 2004, a government complex anchoring a purpose-built civic axis, and eventually the Ping An Finance Centre in 2017, now the city's tallest building. Each generation of towers replaced the previous height record, tracing the pace of the city's economic rise.