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In 2003, amid the SARS outbreak and mounting financial troubles at the developer consortium, construction on the Taipei 101 tower was halted at roughly two-thirds height and never resumed. The unfinished skeleton became a fixture of Taipei's skyline and a long-running case study in failed megaprojects, reshaping how Taiwan financed and regulated supertall construction for a generation.
Diverged 2003 · “The Taipei 101 tower project is abandoned before completion in 2003.”
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TodayTaipei's skyline today is anchored not by a finished supertall tower but by the grey, weather-streaked frame long known as Chaigao, stabilized in the 2010s and partially opened to the public as an observation scaffold and informal memorial to speculative-era excess. Kaohsiung's Sky Tower, completed in 2011 and later extended, is now Taiwan's tallest occupied building and a point of regional civic pride. The abandoned tower's name is still shorthand in Taiwanese political and business discourse for overreach, and the Large-Scale Structure Idle Hazard Act it prompted remains a reference point for construction regulation across East Asia.
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