Goldin Finance 117, also known as the China 117 Tower, is a supertall skyscraper in Tianjin’s Xiqing District, rising to 597 meters with 128 storeys above ground — 117 of them designated for offices, a hotel, and commercial use, which gives the building its name. Designed by Hong Kong’s P&T Group and developed by the Hong Kong-listed Goldin group and its founder Pan Sutong, it broke ground in 2008–2009 as the soaring centerpiece of a new business and equestrian-themed district called Goldin Metropolitan.
The tower reached its full structural height — topping out — in September 2015, its slender, tapering ‘walking stick’ form capped by a multi-story diamond-shaped crown intended to house an atrium with a swimming pool and an observation deck. But beyond the frame, the building stalled. Its developer hit severe financial trouble in the wake of the June 2015 Chinese stock-market crash, and the costly work of cladding, fitting out the offices and hotel, and bringing the tower into service simply stopped, leaving one of the world’s tallest buildings standing unfinished and unoccupied.
For roughly a decade the 117 Tower became a global icon of arrested ambition — a fully formed supertall silhouette with no tenants and no opening date, dominating the Tianjin plain, and eventually certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest unoccupied building. China’s later national curbs on supertall construction, including a 2021 ban on new buildings above 500 meters, further clouded any path to finishing or repurposing such an outsized structure.
The story turned in 2025, when a permit was reissued — to P&T Group and BGI Engineering Consultants — to finish the building, with a reported contract value of about 569 million yuan (roughly $78 million) and completion targeted for 2027. After nearly ten years as the world’s tallest unoccupied building, Goldin Finance 117 moved from emblem of stalled excess toward a possible, long-delayed completion.
Yujiapu is a purpose-built financial district in the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, a port city southeast of Beijing, explicitly modeled on Lower Manhattan and Rockefeller Center. Conceived in the late 2000s as the centerpiece of a wider Binhai growth push, it was meant to rise from a bend in the Hai River into a dense cluster of dozens of office towers that would rival the world’s great financial centers and anchor a new economic engine for northern China.
The district was financed largely through local-government borrowing and state-linked developers, and built far ahead of any demonstrated demand from banks, brokerages, and trading firms. As China’s growth cooled and the costs of the broader Binhai build-out mounted, Yujiapu became a national symbol of overbuilding and local-government debt: by the mid-2010s many of its towers stood unfinished or finished-but-empty, their glass facades fronting wide, lightly used boulevards.
Unlike the spontaneous agglomeration of a real financial hub, Yujiapu was decreed top-down — supply was poured in first, in the hope that tenants would follow. A high-speed rail link, the Yujiapu railway station connecting to Beijing, and gradual completion of more towers brought partial life over time, but occupancy crept up slowly and never approached the dense, round-the-clock financial-center vision that justified the spending.
Into the 2020s Yujiapu has some completed and tenanted towers and functions as a real, if underused, business district, helped by incentives, relocations, and its rail connection. Yet it remains conspicuously short of its envisioned status as a Manhattan-on-the-Hai, a standing reminder that a skyline can be built but a financial economy cannot simply be copied.
The Sathorn Unique Tower is a 49-story, roughly 185-meter residential skyscraper standing abandoned in central Bangkok, near the Chao Phraya River and the Saphan Taksin area. Designed as a luxury condominium development during Thailand’s late-1980s and early-1990s property boom, it was left roughly 80% complete when financing evaporated in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It has stood ever since as a weathered concrete skeleton — its upper floors open to the sky, its unfinished balconies and bare columns visible for miles.
The building has become one of the most notorious abandoned skyscrapers in the world and is widely known as Bangkok’s ‘Ghost Tower.’ For years it drew urban explorers, photographers, and thrill-seekers who climbed its dark, exposed stairwells to reach the rooftop views over the city. Its eerie reputation was reinforced by accidents and by the discovery of a body inside the derelict structure in 2014, which deepened the local belief that the tower is haunted.
Unlike a building stalled in a remote location, the Ghost Tower sits in the middle of a dense, valuable urban district, which makes its decades of emptiness all the more striking. It is a near-finished high-rise — complete with its structural frame, floor plates, and much of its facade openings — that was never legally occupied and never generated a single resident.
The tower’s continued existence reflects a tangle of bankruptcy, ownership disputes, and the sheer cost of either finishing or demolishing such a large structure. Decades after the crash that stranded it, the Sathorn Unique remains neither completed nor torn down: an unfinished monument to a credit boom that ended abruptly, secured against trespassers but otherwise left to weather in place.
The Ryugyong Hotel is a 330-meter, 105-story pyramidal tower that dominates the skyline of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Begun in 1987 as a Cold War prestige project, it was intended to be the tallest hotel in the world and one of the tallest buildings on Earth at the time. Construction on the colossal concrete frame reached close to its structural top-out before work halted in 1992, and the building then stood as a raw, windowless concrete shell — cranes left frozen at its summit — for roughly sixteen years.
The tower’s distinctive three-winged pyramid form, angled at 75 degrees and crowned by a cluster that was meant to hold revolving restaurants and observation decks, made it unmistakable from across the city. Yet for most of its existence it has been an icon of incompletion rather than of luxury, earning the nickname the ‘Hotel of Doom’ among foreign observers who watched it sit empty year after year. Foreign guidebooks and photographers long airbrushed the unfinished structure out of official images, while the regime declined to acknowledge the stalled state of its flagship building.
Exterior work finally resumed in 2008, when Egypt’s Orascom — which was simultaneously building North Korea’s mobile-telephone network — began cladding the facade in glass and metal panels. The reflective glass skin was completed around 2011, transforming the bare grey shell into a gleaming mirrored pyramid. In 2018 a vast LED display was mounted across one of the building’s faces, turning the tower into a giant illuminated propaganda screen for nighttime light shows.
Despite the finished exterior and the spectacle of its light displays, the Ryugyong Hotel has never opened to guests. As of 2025 there are no operating hotel rooms, no functioning interior fit-out reported, and the building has hosted neither tourists nor business travelers in nearly four decades since work began — a finished-looking facade wrapped around an unfinished and unused interior.