China Built a 117-Story Megatower — And It's Already Falling Apart
September 11, 2026 · 12 min
Outside Tianjin stands Goldin Finance 117: 597 meters, 117 stories, taller than One World Trade Center. It topped out in September 2015 as one of the tallest buildings in the world. Today it’s empty, the tallest abandoned building ever.
The video’s point is that this was not an engineering failure. The structure is excellent. What failed was the money, the location and the market.
A billionaire’s district
Hong Kong billionaire Pan Sutong planned Goldin Metropolitan as a playground for the ultra-rich: two international polo fields, stables, a luxury hotel, mansions and a wine museum. The tower at the center was meant to have the world’s highest observation deck and swimming pool, inside a diamond-shaped crown.
The engineering
- Foundation: 941 piles driven deep into Tianjin’s soft clay, some over 100 meters, topped by a raft slab poured non-stop for about 120 hours in December 2011, around 65,000 m³ of concrete.
- Mega-columns: four corner columns built from welded steel boxes filled with high-strength concrete, large enough to drive a car through before they were filled.
- Result: a frame designed for typhoon winds and seismic loads, finished on schedule.
The money stops
Pan’s companies depended on soaring share prices. When China’s stock market crashed in summer 2015, the cash dried up. A “temporary pause” turned into years.
How an unfinished tower decays
The glass cladding reached only about a third of the way up. Above that, rain pools on open floor slabs and runs down elevator shafts. Water freezes in the concrete in winter, and exposed steel rusts and expands. Every year it sits open, the repair bill grows.
Stuck between finishing and demolition
- Tianjin is 30 minutes from Beijing by high-speed rail, and corporate headquarters go to Beijing. The demand the tower assumed never existed.
- In 2020 China banned new buildings over 500 m and tightly restricted anything over 250 m.
- Finishing it would mean billions for a rotting structure that breaks the new limits. Demolishing a 600 m tower would cost hundreds of millions and take years.
Key takeaways
- The foundation and frame did everything they were designed to do.
- The project failed on finance, location and demand, not physics.
- Its strength is the problem: it won’t fall down, so it will stand empty for decades.
More from the channel: @ChinaUnderStress