The tower's design journey began with a land bid concept by Farrells, then passed to Kohn Pedersen Fox, who spent fourteen months refining the concept into something buildable at this scale. Construction started with a groundbreaking ceremony on September 19, 2011, and the builders from China Construction Third Engineering Bureau expected to finish within five years. They came close. The tower structurally topped out on July 9, 2017, fully topped out on August 18, 2017, and was completed the following year, making it the tallest building finished anywhere in the world in 2018. The building is mixed-use by design: sixty floors of office space, twenty floors of luxury apartments, and twenty floors of hotel with 300 rooms. A rooftop garden crowns the structure at 522 meters, and the building holds the distinction of being the tallest in the world with a rooftop helipad.

The tower's office areas are divided into seven zones, and the anchor tenants read like a roster of Chinese economic power. China CITIC Bank occupies Areas 1 through 3, Alibaba fills Area 5, and CITIC Group itself claims Area 7. The remaining spaces are leased to Fortune Global 500 companies and major financial institutions, including China Construction Bank. This concentration of corporate firepower in a single structure reflects Beijing's ambition to consolidate its financial center in the eastern CBD, where the tower stands as the unmistakable anchor. The building is Northern China's third-tallest overall, after the Goldin Finance 117 and the Chow Tai Fook Binhai Center in Tianjin, but within Beijing itself, nothing comes close.

In April 2018, Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported a problem that no architect had anticipated. From levels 106 through 108, including a planned observatory, the entire Zhongnanhai complex was visible with the naked eye on a clear day. Zhongnanhai serves as the headquarters of both the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council. With high-end telescopes, the daily activities of China's top leaders could theoretically be monitored from the tower's upper floors. The building was ordered to undergo rectification for what authorities described as fire safety issues, though the CITIC Group acknowledged it could not reveal the specific reasons. Reports indicated that the top three floors would be administered by national security authorities. A building designed to symbolize openness and ambition had inadvertently offered too clear a view of the machinery of power.

Stand at street level in the CBD and the tower's silhouette makes immediate sense. The flared top and base, cinched at the midsection, echo the bronze zun vessels that have been found in archaeological sites dating back thousands of years. It is a form that speaks of ritual, ceremony, and the careful act of pouring. Whether the metaphor holds for a building that pours corporate tenants into sixty floors of office space is a question the architects likely considered and decided they could live with. What matters more, perhaps, is what the tower says about Beijing's relationship with height. The 180-meter cap ensures that China Zun will stand alone at the top of the skyline for decades, a singular exclamation point over a city that has always preferred to spread rather than soar.