I.M. Pei was Chinese-American, born in Guangzhou, educated at MIT and Harvard, and by the time he received the Bank of China commission he had already designed the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and would go on to win the Pritzker Prize in 1983. The tower at 1 Garden Road was his most personal large-scale work in many ways — a return, architecturally, to a city and a culture he knew from childhood. The original target completion date was 8 August 1988: triple eights, among the most auspicious combinations in Chinese numerology. Project delays pushed groundbreaking back to March 1985, and the completion slipped nearly two years. The building was topped out in 1989 and first occupied on 15 June 1990. By then, a press conference planned for May 1989 to celebrate the building's "designer socialist furnishings" had been quietly cancelled — the Tiananmen Square protests had made any Bank of China publicity untenable.

At 315 metres, with twin masts reaching 367.4 metres, the Bank of China Tower was the tallest building in Hong Kong and Asia from 1990 to 1992. More significantly, it was the first building outside the United States to exceed 305 metres — the 1,000-foot threshold that had been an American monopoly since the skyscraper era began. It was also the first composite space frame high-rise ever built. The structural logic Pei devised with engineer Leslie E. Robertson — who had previously worked on the original World Trade Center towers — eliminated the need for internal columns. The entire weight of the 72-storey building transfers through triangular frameworks to four steel columns at the building's corners. This is why the interior floors are unobstructed: the structure is essentially a self-bracing geometric skeleton, the 'X' shapes that troubled feng shui practitioners being the visible expression of a sophisticated load-transfer system. It is now the fourth-tallest skyscraper in Hong Kong, surpassed by the International Commerce Centre, Two International Finance Centre, and Central Plaza.

Feng shui masters who examined the building's design identified two classes of problem. The sharp triangular edges pointed outward toward other buildings — the Government House in particular — and were thought to project cutting energy toward their neighbors. The numerous X-shaped bracing elements in the facade suggested, in the symbolic vocabulary of feng shui, negation or cancellation. Pei reportedly modified the design to some degree after these concerns were raised, though the building retained its fundamental geometry. Whether or not one takes feng shui seriously as a system of environmental philosophy, the controversy revealed something real about Hong Kong's architectural culture: that a developer's decision to bypass these consultations entirely was not merely eccentric but legible as a political statement. In a city where major institutions took such things seriously as a matter of course, opting out read as a message. The Bank of China's message, intentional or not, was about who this building represented and what it thought about local conventions.

The tower houses the headquarters of Bank of China (Hong Kong) Limited at 1 Garden Road, accessible on foot through Chater Garden from Central MTR station. A public observation deck on the 43rd floor offered harbor views for some years but is now closed. What persists is the building's role in Hong Kong's visual identity: it appears in the *It's a Small World* attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland, featured in two *SimCity* games as a placeable landmark, and has been destroyed or threatened by aliens, giant robots, and a fictional kaiju in a range of Hollywood productions while surviving unscathed in all of them. In *Godzilla vs. Kong*, the tower stands intact after Godzilla and Kong level everything around it — a durability the building's real structural engineers would probably consider appropriate.