Every evening crowds gather on the Bund to photograph the towers across the Huangpu. The view is so familiar that it is easy to forget it had to be built, bridge by bridge, pile by pile, on some of the least promising ground for skyscrapers anywhere in the world. Pudong sits on the soft, waterlogged sediments of the Yangtze delta. In 1990 it had no bridge across the river to central Shanghai, only two road tunnels, and a waterfront lined with shipyards, warehouses and crowded housing.
Our earlier article, Pudong from farmland to the future of Shanghai, tells the political and economic story: the 1990 decision, the development zones and what Pudong has become. This piece looks at the physical side. It covers how Lujiazui was planned, how the river was crossed by bridges and tunnels, how super-tall towers were put on mud with deep piles, how Pudong airport and the Yangshan deepwater port were built on the soft ground of the Yangtze delta, the financial trick with land that helped pay for it all, and who paid, in money and in homes.
A Road Called Mud Ferry
When the central government announced the development of Pudong in April 1990, Shanghai set up three state-owned development companies for Lujiazui, Jinqiao and Waigaoqiao. The man put in charge of Lujiazui, Wang Ande, later described how his team of six began by going door to door.
What they found, by Wang’s account, was sobering. The 1.7 square kilometres of the planned financial core, the area now known as “small Lujiazui”, held 16,945 households and 49,234 registered residents. It also held 39 large enterprises, including shipyards, plus 14 wharves and warehouses and over 250 small businesses. Across the wider 42-square-kilometre Lujiazui zone, Wang counted around 650,000 people. When Mayor Zhu Rongji heard this, Wang recalled, he exclaimed that this was not building a business district at all but rebuilding an old city.
The state of the place was summed up by a real street name, Lanniduo Road, which means “mud ferry road”. The ground itself was the other problem. Pudong, like the rest of Shanghai, is built on hundreds of metres of alluvial sediment laid down by the Yangtze: layers of soft clay, silt and sand, saturated with water almost to the surface. Solid bedrock lies far too deep for any foundation to reach. Every tower in Lujiazui therefore stands, in effect, on engineered mud.
Drawing Lujiazui
Before anything tall could go up, Shanghai needed a plan for the core. The idea of inviting foreign architects came from Zhu Rongji, who during a visit to France in April 1991 agreed with the French government to organise an international consultation on Lujiazui’s urban design. In May 1992 invitations went out to four foreign practices: Richard Rogers from Britain, Dominique Perrault from France, Massimiliano Fuksas from Italy and Toyo Ito from Japan. They competed alongside a joint Shanghai team drawn from the city planning institute, two major design institutes and Tongji University.
The schemes, presented in Shanghai on 20 November 1992, were strikingly different. Rogers proposed a circular district around a large green space, which critics compared to a Roman arena. Perrault set his towers along the river in a right angle, like an open book. Fuksas drew an oval, fortress-like district split by a waterway. Ito’s plan was a series of linear functional bands that reminded observers of a circuit board or a barcode.
No single scheme was chosen. Instead a working group led by Huang Fuxiang, chief engineer of the Shanghai planning institute, spent 1993 combining ideas, taking the Shanghai scheme as the base and borrowing most heavily from Rogers. According to Wang Ande, Rogers told the visiting Shanghai delegation that copying his concept literally “would be a disaster”, and that they should take its spirit instead. The municipal government approved the final Lujiazui Central Area plan on 28 December 1993. It fixed the main features of today’s district: a large central park, towers rising in height from the riverbank towards a cluster of super-tall buildings, and a strong east–west axis that became Century Avenue.
The plan was then built with unusual fidelity. Lujiazui Central Green, a park of about 10 hectares, opened on 1 July 1997 after more than 3,500 households and over 30 businesses were moved off the site. Century Avenue, a 100-metre-wide boulevard running about 5.5 kilometres east from the river, was designed by the French practice of Jean-Marie Charpentier and opened on 18 April 2000.
Paying With Land
The development companies faced an awkward problem at the start: they had land but no money. Shanghai had already begun leasing state land for fees. The first such auction, in 1988, was for a plot in Hongqiao on the other side of the city. But the new companies could not afford to pay for the land they were supposed to develop. For Waigaoqiao alone, four square kilometres at 60 yuan a square metre would have cost 240 million yuan.
The solution became known as “funds circulating on paper, land transferred in reality”. In June 1991 officials from the land and finance departments, a Shanghai investment trust company and the three development companies endorsed cheques to one another. The land departments signed lease contracts with the companies, the companies “paid” with cheques funded by the government, and the money flowed straight back to the government as its capital injection into the companies. No new money changed hands. The result was that the companies now held land-use rights that could legally be mortgaged, leased or used as a stake in joint ventures, which land simply allocated by the state could not.
The companies then used that land to raise real money. Wang Ande described an early deal in which Lujiazui contributed a 24-hectare riverside plot to a joint venture with the Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand. The Chinese side kept 55 per cent, and the cash from the partner, about 12 million US dollars, was a large sum for a district whose annual revenue was then around 200 million yuan. According to figures published by Chinese media, by the end of 1999 Pudong had transferred 23 large parcels totalling about 61.6 square kilometres this way. It had drawn in more than 20 billion yuan of joint-venture capital on the land and roughly 40 billion yuan of property investment. Those figures come from official sources and are hard to check independently, but the mechanism is well documented. Rising land values paid for the roads, bridges and utilities that raised land values further.
Bridging the Huangpu
None of this was worth much while crossing the river meant queuing for a ferry. The first urban bridge across the Huangpu was the Nanpu Bridge, begun in December 1988. It was designed by the Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute under the bridge engineer Lin Yuanpei. It was a cable-stayed bridge with a main span of 423 metres, the longest in China at the time, placed at one of the narrowest points of the river so that it could cross in a single leap. This left ships of up to 50,000 tonnes a clear 46 metres of headroom. To gain that height on the cramped Puxi bank, the approach road was built as a tight spiral that became a landmark in its own right.
The Nanpu Bridge opened on 1 December 1991 at a cost of about 820 million yuan. According to Xinhua, it cut the time for a vehicle to cross from more than two hours of queuing for a ferry to seven minutes. Deng Xiaoping, who had visited the site in February 1991, wrote the name that still appears on its towers.
Its sister, the Yangpu Bridge further downstream, was even bolder. Lin’s team considered repeating the Nanpu design, which would have required a pier in the river, but chose instead to put both towers on land. That meant a main span of 602 metres, when the world record for a cable-stayed bridge stood at about 530 metres. Local accounts say the design was reviewed by international experts engaged through the Asian Development Bank before work began in 1991. The main span was joined in April 1993 and the bridge opened on 23 October 1993. For a time it was the longest cable-stayed span in the world, carried from towers 208 metres high.
Going Under the River
The other way across was underneath. Shanghai had opened China’s first underwater road tunnel, at Dapu Road, in 1971. The second, the Yan’an East Road Tunnel, linking the Bund area directly to Lujiazui, opened to traffic in 1989 after years of construction. It had a single two-lane bore, and it was so overloaded that a second bore was begun in January 1994 and opened in November 1996. Tunnelling here meant driving shield machines through the same soft, wet clay that made foundations difficult.
The biggest change came with the metro. Line 2 opened on 20 September 1999 between Zhongshan Park in Puxi and Longyang Road in Pudong, passing beneath the Huangpu and giving Lujiazui a direct rail link to Nanjing Road and People’s Square. Longyang Road later became the terminus of the Shanghai Maglev to the airport. In 2000 a pedestrian Bund Sightseeing Tunnel opened as well, carrying tourists in small automated cabins through a light show, a novelty more than a transport link.
After that the crossings multiplied: the Outer Ring and Dalian Road tunnels in 2003, then many more. By early 2019, according to a report on the tunnelling company’s history, the Huangpu was crossed by 14 road tunnels plus the sightseeing tunnel, in addition to bridges and several metro lines.
Building Tall on Soft Ground
Shanghai’s ground has a long history of moving. Sinking of the city was first recorded in 1921, and by 1965 heavy pumping of groundwater had lowered parts of the central city by as much as about 2.6 metres, according to studies published by Shanghai geologists. From the mid-1960s the city restricted groundwater extraction and began pumping water back into aquifers, which slowed the sinking sharply. But subsidence has never stopped completely, and the weight of buildings and deep excavations for basements and metro lines contribute to it.
For a skyscraper on this ground, the answer is piles: long columns of steel or reinforced concrete driven or bored down through the soft upper layers until they reach firmer sand. The building rests on a thick concrete raft that spreads its load across hundreds of these piles. Deep basements add another difficulty. Digging them means pumping out groundwater, and if that is done carelessly the ground around the site can settle, damaging roads and neighbouring buildings. So Shanghai contractors surround excavations with deep retaining walls and monitor water levels constantly.
The scale grew with each generation of towers. Jin Mao, completed in 1999, stands on more than a thousand open-ended steel pipe piles, each about 83 metres long, according to published engineering reviews, under a raft about four metres thick. Its neighbour, the Shanghai Tower, rests on a raft about six metres thick. It was poured in a single continuous operation of about 60,000 cubic metres of concrete over roughly 63 hours in 2010. Beneath it are some 980 bored piles reaching as deep as about 86 metres, though published figures for the number and length of piles vary between sources. Even so, engineers expected measurable settlement and designed for it.
The Pearl and Jin Mao
The first landmark to rise was not an office tower but a television mast. The Oriental Pearl Tower, designed by Jiang Huanchen and his colleagues at the East China Architectural Design Institute, was begun on 30 July 1991. It opened to visitors on 1 October 1994, with its broadcasting and sightseeing functions fully in service by May 1995. At 468 metres, with its stack of pink spheres held up by three great concrete columns, it was for more than a decade the tallest structure in China. Its site was already fixed when the foreign architects arrived, and almost every 1992 scheme arranged its towers around it.
The first true super-tall building was Jin Mao, designed by Adrian Smith of the American firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Construction began in 1994 and the building opened in 1999. It is 420.5 metres tall, with 88 storeys. Its tapering, stepped profile draws on the proportions of a Chinese pagoda and plays repeatedly on the number eight, considered lucky in Chinese culture. Structurally it relies on a massive reinforced concrete core linked by steel outrigger trusses to huge composite columns at the edges. The upper floors are occupied by a hotel arranged around a vast atrium. Jin Mao remained the tallest building in China until 2008.
The Bottle Opener and the Twist
The second tower in the cluster had a far rockier path. The Shanghai World Financial Center was developed by Japan’s Mori Building and designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. Its foundations were started in 1997, just as the Asian financial crisis struck, and work stopped. When construction resumed in 2003, the tower had been redesigned to rise to 492 metres. Published accounts say the design had to work with foundations already laid for a smaller building, so the new structure was made lighter.
Its most famous feature caused the most trouble. The original design had a large circular opening at the top to relieve wind pressure. Critics in China said a round hole in a Japanese-developed tower looked too much like the rising sun of the Japanese flag, a sensitive image given the history of Japan’s wartime occupation of Shanghai. In 2005 the design was changed to a trapezoidal opening. The developer said the change also simplified construction. The result earned the building its enduring nickname, “the bottle opener”. It opened in August 2008 and was China’s tallest building until the Shanghai Tower overtook it.
The third and tallest, the Shanghai Tower, was designed by the American firm Gensler, with Jun Xia as lead designer. Work began in November 2008, the structure topped out in August 2013 and the building was completed in 2015. It is 632 metres tall, the tallest in China. The tower’s form rotates by about 120 degrees as it rises. Gensler says this cut wind loads substantially, allowing a lighter structure. The building is wrapped in a double skin of glass, with atrium “sky gardens” in the space between the inner and outer walls. Its construction cost is commonly reported at about 14.8 billion yuan, although that figure cannot be independently confirmed.
The tower also brought Shanghai’s soil back into the headlines. In early 2012 workers found large cracks in the ground near the construction site, some wide enough to fit three fingers, according to the Global Times, and pictures spread quickly online. The main contractor said such settlement was normal during construction and was being monitored. An official from the Ministry of Land and Resources told CCTV the cracks were caused by pressure from work on the foundations. Talk that the tower itself was “sinking” was never supported by official data. But it revived an old worry that Shanghai was too heavy for its own ground.
An Airport on the Mudflats and a Port at Sea
Pudong’s construction extended far beyond Lujiazui. Pudong International Airport was built on the coast at the eastern edge of the district. Its first phase began in October 1997 and opened on 16 September 1999. Rather than take more farmland, planners enclosed and reclaimed tidal mudflats along the shore. According to accounts of the project, this moved the site about 700 metres seaward and created roughly 18 square kilometres of extra land for future expansion. It also reduced the number of households that had to be moved. The first phase occupied about 12 square kilometres, with a 4,000-metre runway.
The most audacious project was at sea. Shanghai’s own river port was too shallow for the largest container ships, so the city looked to Yangshan, a group of small islands about 30 kilometres offshore that belong administratively to Zhejiang province. Work on both the port and a bridge to reach it began in June 2002. The Donghai Bridge, about 32.5 kilometres long, runs from the Pudong coast at Luchaogang across open water to the islands. It was one of the longest sea crossings in the world when it opened in December 2005. The first phase of Yangshan Deepwater Port opened on 10 December 2005 with five berths, built partly on land reclaimed between the islands. Later phases, including a highly automated terminal opened in 2017, helped make Shanghai the world’s busiest container port.
The People Who Moved and the People Who Built
All of this rested on two groups of people whose stories are less often told. The first were the residents who had to leave. Lujiazui was not empty farmland but a dense working district, and clearing it meant relocating tens of thousands of households and dozens of factories. Families moved to new estates further out, often into flats with modern plumbing that many welcomed, but they lost neighbourhoods and networks built over generations. Contemporary official accounts stress compensation standards and improved living conditions. Independent data on how relocated families fared over the long term is scarce, and experiences clearly varied.
The second group were the builders. Pudong was constructed largely by rural migrants from other provinces, working on contract for construction firms and usually without Shanghai household registration. A 1993 survey found about 2.81 million people in Shanghai’s “floating population”, and roughly a quarter of those who were working were employed in construction, according to a study published by the University of Cologne. A survey in Pudong found that migrants with regular jobs usually lived in dormitories on construction sites, while about 30 per cent rented rooms or built simple unauthorised huts. The popular claim that Shanghai once had a fifth or a quarter of the world’s cranes is often repeated but has never been reliably sourced. What is certain is that Lujiazui’s towers were raised by a vast, mobile and often poorly protected workforce that rarely appears in the official histories.
Conclusion
Pudong’s construction is often told as a story of speed. It was fast: from the first bridge in 1991 to the Shanghai Tower in 2015 is less than a quarter of a century. But speed alone does not explain it. It depended on a plan that was written carefully and then largely kept, on a financial trick that turned land into capital, and on engineering adapted to some of the most difficult ground in China. And it depended on people who left their homes, or came from far away to build.
For visitors on the Bund, the skyline across the river looks like a single composition, and in a sense it is: the 1993 plan anticipated much of what stands there now. But it is also a record of decisions made one at a time, from Nanpu’s spiral ramp and Jin Mao’s 83-metre piles to the redesigned opening of the bottle opener and the six-metre raft under the Shanghai Tower. Pudong was built on mud, and the fact that it stands at all is its greatest engineering achievement.
