The tower's most distinctive feature is its shape: two pentagonal towers joined together, rising as conjoined structures toward the red star at the summit. This unusual design is intentional, meant to symbolize the workers who struck while building the Beijing-Hankou railway -- one of the most important rail lines in early 20th-century China, connecting the capital to the industrial south. The February 7 strike of 1923 was one of the most significant labor actions in Chinese history. Railway workers along the Beijing-Hankou line organized a general strike demanding better working conditions and the right to unionize. The warlord government of the time responded with violent suppression, and the strike's leaders became martyrs in the narrative of China's revolutionary movement. The tower's 14 floors house historical relics, photographs, and written materials documenting the strike and its aftermath.

Below the red star sits a clock measuring 2.7 meters across. Its hourly rendition of "The East Is Red" -- a song that became virtually synonymous with the Mao era -- anchors the tower firmly in its ideological moment. The tower was completed on September 29, 1971, during the Cultural Revolution, when memorializing revolutionary history carried intense political urgency. For years after its construction, the Erqi Memorial Tower was the tallest building in Zhengzhou, a distinction it held until 1976. The city has long since grown up and around it. Modern skyscrapers dwarf the structure. But the tower's symbolic stature has outlasted its physical dominance of the skyline, and it remains the landmark most associated with the city itself.

In May 2020, city authorities announced plans to enlarge Erqi Square to 21,000 square meters -- a significant expansion designed to give the tower more visual breathing room. The plan included reducing the height of an adjacent 20-story building called the Friendship Mansion down to just 6 stories. It is an unusual act of architectural subtraction: deliberately shrinking a modern building so that a 63-meter monument completed in 1971 can once again command attention. The gesture speaks to the tower's enduring place in Zhengzhou's identity. In a city that has transformed almost beyond recognition since the tower was built -- a city that was a provincial backwater when the railway workers struck in 1923 and is now a metropolis of more than 10 million -- the Erqi Memorial Tower anchors the present to a particular reading of the past. The clock still plays. The star still shines red.