Lujiazui — a financial district that was farmland thirty years ago

Until 1990, the land now occupied by Lujiazui's skyscrapers was marshy farmland and warehouse-lined riverbank, so unremarkable that Shanghai's own residents dismissed it with a well-worn saying: they would rather have a bed in the old western city of Puxi than a house across the river in Pudong. That changed the moment Deng Xiaoping declared Pudong a national priority for economic reform, launching what became one of the most compressed urban transformations in modern history. Within three decades, the fields and fish ponds gave way to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, over 600 multinational corporate headquarters, and a skyline recognisable on every continent.

That skyline's centrepiece, the Shanghai Tower, was completed in 2015 at 632 metres, making it the second-tallest building in the world and the tallest in China — its twisting glass form engineered to reduce wind load by 24 percent compared to a straight-sided design. It stands alongside the Shanghai World Financial Center, nicknamed the "bottle opener" for the trapezoidal aperture cut through its top, and the pagoda-tiered Jin Mao Tower, three buildings from three different decades that together turned a stretch of reclaimed marshland into one of the most photographed skylines on Earth.

What the camera shows

Shanghai beyond the webcam

The Bund: the colonial-era waterfront directly across the Huangpu River, offering the classic view back toward Lujiazui.

Oriental Pearl Tower: the 1994 landmark with a transparent observation floor, one of the first buildings to define Pudong's skyline.

Yu Garden: a Ming Dynasty classical garden a short distance from the modern towers.

When to watch

Evening: for the Lujiazui skyline lit up against the darkening Huangpu River.

Getting there: Lujiazui sits in the Pudong New Area, directly across the Huangpu River from the Bund, Shanghai, China.