Aiqun Hotel

This guide to the Aiqun Hotel in Guangzhou starts underground, in nineteen thirty-six, with eighty-eight steel columns and four hundred and four concrete piles being driven into soft river silt along the Pearl River. It follows architect Chen Rongzhi's gamble on building the city's first true steel-framed skyscraper on ground everyone else considered too unstable to hold one, and the ten months of pile-driving neighbors called reckless. When the hotel opened in nineteen thirty-seven as Guangzhou's tallest building, its narrow lines and arched windows announced a new era for the skyline. The guide carries that foundation through wartime bombing raids that tested exactly what Chen had built.