Oriental Pearl Tower
— — the river's other shore, lit pink at dusk.
Not only on a wall.
“The tower Shanghai built when Pudong was still mostly farmland and rice paddies. Eleven spheres threaded on three columns, 468 metres up, holding the eastern skyline together. From the Bund promenade it reads as a single silhouette against the river. After dark the spheres cycle through colour and the Huangpu carries the reflection downstream toward the harbour.
Oriental Pearl Tower, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Oriental Pearl Tower stands on the west edge of Pudong's Lujiazui financial district, at the bend where the Huangpu River separates from the historic Bund. Completed in 1994 and rising 468 metres, it was the tallest structure in China for thirteen years until the Shanghai World Financial Center surpassed it. The architect Jiang Huan Cheng of the Shanghai Modern Architectural Design Company arranged eleven steel spheres along three slanting columns, a form drawn from a Tang dynasty poem by Bai Juyi about pearls falling on a jade plate.
From sundown until around ten in the evening the spheres cycle through saturated colour: pink, violet, gold, jade, synchronised with the laser show along the Bund opposite. The pink hour is the one river photographers wait for, when the largest sphere reads as a soft lantern against deep blue sky. Lujiazui's surrounding towers, the Jin Mao and Shanghai Tower among them, give back the light in their mirrored cladding so the whole bank glows for a long thirty minutes.
The tower opens daily from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., with the upper-sphere observation deck and the rotating restaurant requiring separate tickets booked through the official site. Line 2 of the Shanghai Metro stops at Lujiazui station, a short walk to the base. The clearest river views are from the Bund promenade across the Huangpu rather than from inside the tower itself; the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel ferries between the two banks every few minutes throughout the day.