Standing as the tallest building in Nanjing for 14 years, the Jiangsu Nanjing Television Tower even today remains distinctive as an imposing pillar of modern-Marxist architecture that dominates the northern Hexi skyline by the Qinhuai River.
Plans for the 318.5 metre-high Tower had been floating around since 1989, but it was not until 1993 that work began in earnest.
The Tower’s six-story base today houses the Jiangsu Science Palace and a climbing hall, among other facilities, while the Tower itself sits atop, where its three legs stand closely together, forming a hollow vertical core. Within those legs, two high-speed lifts transport tourists back and forth between the Tower’s uppermost sections and its base at a speed of 6 metres per second.
Reminiscent of 1950s sci-fi, “flying saucers”, those sections house observation decks.
The larger of the two at 32 metres high, The Grand Tower, occupying the Tower at a height from 169 metres, comprises an indoor observation hall and an outdoor platform. And yes, it revolves, taking 60-90 minutes to make one rotation.
Further up the mast is the smaller of the saucers, at a height of 250 metres. Both are decorated with aluminum-alloy framed, glass-curtain walls.
As to the Tower’s primary purpose, aside from serving camera-toting tourists, very little television is today terrestrially broadcast from the Tower (even prior to the internet, most TV in Nanjing was delivered by cable). All FM broadcast radio continues to be beamed from the Tower, while the more-modern age has seen microwave links, requiring line of sight, installed above the rotating platform. Jiangsu TV also maintains several satellite uplinks from the roof of the Tower’s base.
The Jiangsu Nanjing Television Tower lost its crown as Nanjing’s highest construct in 2010, with the opening of the Zifeng Tower, dwarfing the TV and radio mast by a good margin of 132 metres. Nevertheless, to this day, the Tower is still the tallest such telecommunications facility in all of Jiangsu Province.
