Goldin Finance 117, the world’s tallest abandoned building

Goldin Finance 117, an unfinished 597-meter-tall skyscraper on the outskirts of Tianjin, in Northern China on the shore of the Bohai Sea, as well as China’s seventh largest city, is currently the world’s tallest abandoned building.
A record China never wanted to hold.

Proposed back in 2008, when cities across China were vying for their place on the world stage, Goldin Finance 117 was to be the centrepiece of billionaire Pat Sutong’s, “Goldin Metropolitan” scheme – a 1.8 square kilometre high-end residential and central business district about eight kilometres from downtown Tianjin.
With multiple residential and commercial towers, French and Italian style manors, a wine museum, extensive gardens and even a polo club, the scheme was aimed at the super-rich, with the landmark skyscraper viewed as the jewel in its crown.
The building was to be topped with a three-storey diamond-shaped atrium which would have housed the world’s highest observation deck, swimming pool, restaurant and sky bar.
Likened to a walking stick the mixed-use tower would contain 128 floors above ground with 117 of them housing hotel and commercial space – as well as providing the ingenious source of the building’s name – 11 dedicated to mechanical and operational services and a further four levels underground.
Unique among many of the world’s tallest buildings, Goldin Finance 117, also known as China 117 Tower, was to be habitable up to its highest point, foregoing the addition of any vanity height that seems to have become commonplace among many of today’s tallest skyscrapers.
It was catering to the super-rich, although the economic viability of the project was questionable since the beginning.

Designed by P&T Group, its construction began in 2008, but was halted just two years later, during the fallout of the Great Recession.
Work on the project was resumed in 2011 and,despite other minor hiccups, things were looking up, with an estimated completion date between 2018 and 2019.
The building was topped out on 8 September 2015, making it the fifth-tallest building in the world at the time. However, its construction was once again suspended and has not resumed since then.
Following a ceremony to celebrate the topping of the skyscraper at 597 meters, all construction work ceased and, following the bursting of the Chinese stock market bubble, the company lacked the reserves to keep its own stock price afloat, and its leaders could only stand by as the price plummeted.
The building’s owner, Goldin Properties, a subsidiary of Goldin Financial Holdings Ltd., ran into financial difficulties in the aftermath of the June 2015 Chinese stock market crash and was forced to suspend construction in December 2015.
At the time, Goldin Properties was a publicly listed, Hong Kong-based company and a relatively new player in the mainland Chinese market. It had to fully self-finance the entire USD $10BN master plan and wouldn’t be able to begin recouping its investment until each building was completed.
And this put the entire scheme in a precarious situation from the beginning.
After staving off the worst of the Global Financial Crisis, June 2015 saw China’s stock bubble burst, wiping a third off the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s value in a month – and the market volatility persisted until early 2016.
While not a full-blown crisis, the damage was already done and, with nothing left in reserves to ride out the turbulent period, Goldin’s own share price on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange plummeted with company chairman Pan Sutong – with a 64% stake in the business – reportedly lost an eye-watering USD $13BN of his own fortune.
When work on Goldin Finance 117 was suspended, the impressive skyscraper was the fifth tallest building in the world, and now it’s just the world’s tallest abandoned building!

Either way, some say that developing a luxurious project in a second-tier like Tianjin was a bad idea to begin with because it just didn’t spark the interest of the elite it was meant to impress.
The project’s location on former industrial land on the outskirts of one of China’s second-tier cities meant that the appeal for those that could actually afford it simply wasn’t there, and it literally was like attempting to build New York’s Hudson Yards on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
The last hope of seeing Goldin Finance 117 completed apparently faded in 2018, and the 600-meter-tall skyscraper has been abandoned ever since.
With communication drying up and no official word on when – or even if – the project will ever be completed, many have come to wonder how one of the world’s strongest economies with the fastest rate of urbanisation in history – become home to the World’s Tallest Ghostscraper.

Today, Goldin Finance 117 isn’t only the world’s tallest “ghostscraper,” but also a cautionary tale for other developers and even the Chinese Government. Following the failure of Golding Group’s project, authorities issued a decree in 2020 to significantly limit the scale and number of skyscrapers over 500 metres being built across the country.