China's tallest-building site hit by fire

Fire broke out today at the site of China’s future tallest building, although there were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths.

At 5.30pm (10.30am Irish time) black smoke poured from the Shanghai World Financial Centre in the heart of the city’s Pudong financial district, according to an Associated Press photographer on the scene.

Eight fire trucks had been dispatched to douse the blaze.

An officer contacted at Pudong’s Lujiazui police station confirmed the fire, but said he had no other details.

“Firefighters and police are working on the scene. I haven’t got any report about the cause yet. No more details right now,” said the officer.

The fire is just the latest problem to face the wedge-shaped tower, being built at a cost of €670m.

The concrete, steel, and glass tower is due to be finished in 2008, when its 101 storeys will loom 1,614 feet over China’s business hub.

For six years after ground was broken at the site in the mid-1990s, the project was little more than a hole in the ground: The Asian financial crisis had virtually obliterated demand for new office space in Shanghai.

After the project was revived in 2003, the builders had to alter a key design feature – a circular cut-out near the top – after complaints that it resembled the rising sun on Japan’s flag, a symbol reviled by many Chinese because of Japan’s brutal occupation of the country in the Second World War.

And earlier this year, the tower’s builder, Mori Building Co. of Tokyo, were criticised by Shanghai authorities for altering the project’s name to “Shanghai Hills” to link it to its other marquee projects, the famed Roppongi Hills and Omotesando Hills complexes.

The company said the formal registered name of the project remained the Shanghai World Financial Centre and “Shanghai Hills” was merely a branding strategy.