Visiting the World’s Tallest Observatory

After leaving Lanzhou last week, our trip in China took us to the eastern city of Suzhou, Jiansu Province. Suzhou is famous for its classical gardens that have hundreds of years of history and Yangcheng Lake crabs. However, I am not going to talk about gardens and huge crabs today. Instead, I am going to take you a little south and east to the economic and financial center of China, the City of Shanghai.

The distance between Suzhou and Shanghai is about 75 kilometers, or 46 miles. When I went to Shanghai the last time two years ago, there was only regular trains between the two cities. Now, the high-speed train has reduced the travel time to under 30 minutes, less than the time we spent from my home to the train station

Our first stop in Shanghai is The Bund, the western bank of Huangpu River, where many buildings are currently occupied by China’s major banks. AIG (or AIA) also has a building on The Bund. The area west side of the river is the “old” Shanghai, before the development of the eastern side.

The eastern side, also known as Pudong (east of Huangpu River), is the “new” Shanghai and it’s where our destination is. From the above picture (smog is almost everywhere in China. In a sunny day, you can’t even see clearly the buildings right across the river), you can easily tell which one is the tallest building. What contributes to the bad air quality is that there are constructions everywhere in Shanghai as the city prepares for the World Expo in 2010, the moment Shanghai has been eagerly waiting for years, especially Beijing got its turn to host the Olympics this summer.

No, it’s not the 468-meter Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower (OPT), which used to be the tallest building and landmark of Shanghai.

The title belongs to the newly completed Shanghai World Financial Center. At 492 meters, SWFC is 111 meters taller than the Empire State Building and 50 meters taller than the Sears Tower (excluding the antenna). The ticket office of SWFC is located at the basement of the building and the cost for going all the way to the top is RMB 150 (about $22), cheaper than going to the 102nd floor observatory of the Empire State Building. Given that the average monthly salary in Shanghai, which is one of the richest city in China, is about RMB 3,000, the ticket is by no means cheap.

The elevator first took us to the Sky Arena, located at the 94th floor, 430 meters above the ground. If you want to save few bucks (RMB 40, or about $6), you can stop here. BTW, the speed of the elevator is 8 m/s, so it didn’t take too long to go up 430 meters. Actually, I think the evevator is a little too fast because I felt a little bit uncomfortable during ascending. It’s even worse during decending.

Since we have come so far already, we want to go to the top, the observatory located at 100th so we can enjoy the view.

Including the view from the glass floor. A little scary?

From the observatory, everything around SWFC looks so small. The OPT tower, which is 468 meters high, is tiny, as well as the 421-meter Jin Mao Tower next to it.

Interested? Then come over and experience the world’s tallest observatory and the city yourself.

And for more pictures, check out my Flickr page.