Oh, Shanghai There

My mum visited me a few weeks ago, and for her benefit I did something touristy for once – we decided to go to the tallest (and probably my favourite) building of Shanghai’s skyline, the Shanghai World Financial Centre. It’s more commonly known as the “Bottle Opener”… I’ll let you guess why. The 100th floor observatory is the tallest in the world, at 474 metres above the ground.

Put into context, that’s almost double the Eiffel Tower’s top floor height (273m), and significantly taller than the Empire State Building (373.2m). It is brown trousers height.

It looks positively and mammothly monolithic from the bottom, so I was a bit worried about how it would be when we actually got to the 100th floor. I’m not too bad with heights, but this was still going to be the highest up I’d ever been without the aid of an aeroplane. Tickets cost 150 RMB (about 15 quid) if you want to go all the way to the 100th floor, slightly less if you’re happy to settle for the observatories on the 94th and 97th floors.

The whole thing was very space-age (or at least trying to be) – you buy your ticket and go through a barrier, through a room that houses a scale model of the centre of the city. Then there’s this massive video wall that plays a short video about the construction of the building, and then you step into this weird elevator that wouldn’t look out of place on the Starship Enterprise. It wasn’t incredibly tacky, but I suppose it was never going to be understated, either. The lift goes surprisingly fast, and by the 50th or so floor your ears pop. To get from the base to the 94th floor takes around a minute, then you take an escalator and another lift to the 100th floor.

The view from the top… well… it’s pretty scary at first. What makes things worse is that the floor is see-through and you’re at the bottom of the top part of the ‘bottle opener’ bit of the building, so you can see right down through the floor. Obviously with all the crowds and everything it’s perfectly safe, but that doesn’t stop your brain from telling you not to walk on the glass bits in case it breaks. Mental.

You certainly get a sense of the scale of Shanghai – the city spreads outwards in all directions until it’s obscured by the fog. We were lucky enough to get a very clear day, and the vantage point of the observatory really does bring home what a massive city Shanghai has become.

Here’s the view of the awesome looking Jinmao Tower from the observatory, as you can see we were well above the Jinmao’s peak (421m).

Not content with seeing the view, we decided to stay up there another hour or so and wait for sunset, so we could get some night pictures.

It was definitely a pretty amazing, if slightly scary, experience. If you ever come to Shanghai, I’d say it’s worth doing. The price is a little steep for China, but hey.

Next on the list of absurdly high places to go in Shanghai is the Oriental Pearl Tower, though I can’t help feeling it might be a little disappointing after the Bottle Opener. Since I live here I don’t often think about doing much of the tourist stuff (especially after experiencing the hilarious awfulness of the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel), but I should probably do more.

My mum had a really good time here and really enjoyed her first trip to Shanghai. She also bought about 10 fake handbags, 5 fake watches, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Well, when in Rome…