Jin Mao Tower 金贸大厦

I don't know if you can view the chinese characters in the title and in fact I'm not even sure if what I just wrote in chinese says 'Jin Mao Tower', but my computer types chinese(!) so I thought I've give it a go. I hope I haven't written anything rude or political. Anyway, my computer types Chinese if I hit Control+space. The way you type Chinese on a keyboard is to type the words in pinyin (Chinese spelt phonetically using roman letters). Pinyin is what I'm learning, since its too hard to learn the characters. Sometimes my computer switches back to Chinese automatically and all these characters start appearing. It was a bit disconcerting when I didn't know how to change it back to English.

This evening I went up Jin Mao Tower. Its the second-tallest building in Shanghai (420.5m) and was built in 1998. Its 88 floors high - 88 is a very auspicious number. Jin Mao means 'economy' and 'trade', but it also carries the meanings 'gold' and 'prosperity'. Here are some photos I took from the top. There are some slightly more professional pictures of the tower here.

Above is the Oriental Pearl Tower, which looks a bit like something from the Jetsons. Good photos of the Oriental Pearl are here. The river you can see in the pictures is the Huangpu River. Across the river is the Bund, the name for the area along the shore line, which has lots of Western early 20th century buildings - very nice at night and a tourist attraction of Shanghai. One of the pictures below shows the view from the observation tower down into the Hyatt atrium. The Hyatt is on the 57th to the 84th floors.

Check out the Shanghai World Financial Centre here. I've also added a photo of is below. It's planned for completion in 1997. Some people don't like it because the circle up the top is a bit like the rising sun on the Japanese flag.