Shun Hing Square was constructed at a pace of four floors every nine days — a schedule that required extraordinary coordination between the structural engineering teams and the workers assembling the all-steel frame. In total, 24,500 tonnes of steel went into the structure. For comparison, the Eiffel Tower used approximately 7,300 tonnes; Shun Hing Square consumed more than three times as much. The all-steel method, unusual for China at the time, was one reason the building still holds records: as of 2025, it remains the tallest all-steel building in China. The main tower contains offices, a multi-level parking garage, and a five-story shopping arcade with four sets of escalators and seven elevators. Individual floors range from 3,450 to 4,900 square meters. At the top — the 69th floor — is the Meridian View Center observation deck, from which the geometry of Shenzhen's growth is visible in every direction.

Shun Hing Square held the title of China's tallest building for twelve months, from its completion in 1996 until CITIC Plaza in Guangzhou surpassed it in 1997. That brevity is itself a measure of the era: construction across the Pearl River Delta was moving so fast that any record was provisional. The building also has a more precise claim to history: it was the first skyscraper in mainland China — as opposed to Hong Kong, which was still under British sovereignty when the Bank of China Tower and Central Plaza were completed — to rank among the ten tallest in the world. Shenzhen, a city that did not exist as an urban center sixteen years earlier, had produced a building that stood in the top ten on Earth. The city was fifteen years old in 1996. The record-breaking was almost beside the point; the building was the point.

Shenzhen's skyline has grown so rapidly since 1996 that Shun Hing Square, once its tallest structure, now ranks seventh among the city's towers. The 599-meter Ping An Finance Center, completed in 2017, is more than 200 meters taller. The 441.8-meter Kingkey 100 surpassed Shun Hing Square in September 2011. Nationally, the building sits 29th among mainland China's tallest structures. Globally, it ranks 55th. It remains the third-tallest building in the world with fewer than 70 floors — a niche record that reflects how unusual its height-to-floor-count ratio was at the time of construction. From the Meridian View Center observation deck, visitors look out over a skyline that has grown up around and past the building in the decades since it opened, a panorama that is itself a time-lapse of what Shenzhen has become.

In 1996, Shun Hing Square was more than a building. It was a message. Shenzhen, which China's central government had designated a Special Economic Zone only sixteen years earlier, had produced a supertall skyscraper that placed it on the global map of ambitious architecture. The all-steel construction method signaled technical sophistication. The record height signaled ambition. The Diwang name — borrowed from the price of land, the most fundamentally capitalist of inputs — flagged the market logic driving the whole enterprise. Other Chinese cities were building. Other cities would soon build taller. But Shenzhen had done it first, and the fact that the record lasted only a year was the least relevant thing about it. The city had demonstrated what it intended to be. The tower, still visible from most of Luohu District, still makes that argument every day.