Discover Shanghai
Oriental Pearl Tower
东方明珠广播电视塔
The 1994 rocket-and-spheres tower that became Shanghai's logo, with a glass-floor walkway on the 259m level and a small but genuinely good city-history museum in the base. Cheaper than the newer towers and far more photogenic from outside.
The story
What makes this place special
The tower that made Pudong's skyline recognisable: construction began on 30 July 1991, it was completed on 18 November 1994 and opened to the public on 1 May 1995, at a time when the land around it was still largely farmland and warehouses. It is 468m to the tip of the antenna, with the top floor at 351m, and its form - three large spheres threaded on three pillars, after a Tang poem about pearls falling on a jade plate - was a deliberate statement that Shanghai was being rebuilt. It has fifteen observatory levels, several with glass floors, a twenty-room hotel slung between the two big spheres, a revolving restaurant, and museums in the base.
What you’ll discover
Lifts take you up the pillars to the spheres. The upper sphere is the high viewing level; the lower large sphere has the main gallery and the glass-floored outer ring where you walk out over a transparent panel with the ground 250-odd metres below. The revolving restaurant occupies one of the levels. In the base is the Shanghai History Museum display, a walk-through reconstruction of old Shanghai streets with waxworks, trams and shopfronts - dated, and much better than its reputation for understanding what the city looked like before 1949.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- If you want one high view in Shanghai, go up the Shanghai Tower instead - it is far higher, newer and faster. Come to the Oriental Pearl for the glass floor, for the history museum in the base, and because children love it.
- The history exhibition in the basement is the sleeper attraction here and is often included in the combined ticket. Many people queue for an hour, go up, come down and walk out past it.
- There are several ticket tiers covering different combinations of spheres, the glass floor and the museum, and the cheapest one does not include the level most people have come for. Work out which spheres you are buying.
- The queues are the main cost of this tower - it is the default Pudong attraction for domestic groups. Early on a weekday morning or late evening are the only reliable windows.
- The elevated pedestrian ring road around Lujiazui connects the tower to the Shanghai Tower, the malls and the riverside walkway without ever crossing traffic - use it rather than street level.
- The best photographs of the tower are from the Bund across the river at dusk, not from inside it.
When to come
Clear days only, and either early morning or after dark when the tower and the city are lit. Winter and post-rain days give the clearest air; summer afternoons are hazy and the queues are at their worst.
Getting around
Good. The whole visit is lift-based from the base to the spheres, the galleries are level circular floors, and there are accessible toilets and lifts throughout the Lujiazui pedestrian deck and metro station. The limits are the queue, which is long and largely without seating, the crowding on the viewing floors, and the glass floor ring, which is narrow and congested. The history museum in the base is on one level and largely step-free.
Worth knowing before you go
The ticket tiers are confusing at the counter; the 263m sphere plus the basement Shanghai History Museum is the best value, and the museum alone is worth the stop on a grey day.
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