Shenzhen was a fishing village four decades ago. Today it is a metropolis of more than 17 million people, and its Central Business District in Futian bristles with towers that would dominate any skyline in Europe. Ping An Finance Centre is the pinnacle of this ambition. On the morning of 15 July 2014, a single 10-metre steel column was lifted into place, nudging the structure past 443.8 metres and surpassing the KK100 Tower next door to become the tallest building in Shenzhen. The race had a peculiarly local character: Shenzhen competing with itself, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, quarter by quarter. The tower's 18,391-square-metre lot, acquired at auction, gave Kohn Pedersen Fox room to taper the structure into its signature spire — a form that gathers light from Pearl River Delta skies and scatters it back in long diagonal flashes visible from neighbouring Hong Kong.

Thornton Tomasetti handled the structural design, and the engineering challenges at this scale are not abstract. The Pearl River Delta sits in a region of seismic activity and powerful typhoons, and a 599-metre tower must be designed to flex, not resist. The building sways measurably in strong wind — controlled sway, engineered sway, but sway nonetheless. The concrete and steel frame had to be tested repeatedly; construction paused for sample testing before resuming. Inside, Schindler supplied the elevator systems, a project announced in January 2014, designed for a building that, at the time, was to become China's tallest. The observation deck, housed at extreme altitude, offers views on clear days that stretch south across the bay to Hong Kong's own forest of towers, a panorama that makes plain how thoroughly this corner of the Pearl River Delta has been transformed.

Not everyone arrives by elevator. In January 2015, with the tower still under construction and the crane at its crown, Malaysian photographer Keow Wee Loong climbed the building and released footage from a crane at the top. The images circulated widely. A month later, on 19 February 2015, during Chinese New Year, Russian and Ukrainian urban explorers Vadim Makhorov and Vitaly Raskalov of the group Ontheroofs climbed the structure and documented their ascent with video and photographs — perched above a half-finished city, the Pearl River Delta spread out beneath them in the winter haze. The authorities were not amused. Security was subsequently tightened. But the footage has outlasted the controversy, and the images of two figures clinging to a crane 600 metres above Shenzhen have become part of the building's mythology.

By the second quarter of 2019, according to the South China Morning Post, nearly 30 percent of Ping An Finance Centre's office space remained empty. The figure was not unusual for supertall towers in China's major cities, where the race to build high has repeatedly outpaced demand. Shenzhen's economy is real and dynamic, driven by technology companies and financial services, but even a booming city can absorb only so many square metres of prestige office space at once. The vacancy rate reflected a broader pattern: towers built as symbols of municipal ambition sometimes take years to fill. Ping An Finance Centre houses an observation deck, a hotel, retail floors, and offices; occupancy has increased since 2019 as the surrounding CBD matured. The building is, in any case, already what it was meant to be — a statement that Shenzhen's rise is not finished.

The rankings shift. Shanghai Tower, completed in 2015, stands at 632 metres and holds the title of China's tallest building; Ping An Finance Centre sits just behind it in the national standings and fourth in the world at the time of its completion. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 828 metres, remains the world's tallest. These comparisons have a slightly anxious quality — superlatives are provisional in an era of constant construction — but Ping An Finance Centre's physical presence needs no qualification. On a clear afternoon, flying south from Guangzhou toward Hong Kong, the tower appears long before the rest of Shenzhen resolves into detail: a single silver needle, catching the light, marking the place where a fishing village became a metropolis in the time it takes a child to grow up.