Thursday · October · 1 · 2026
“Night hath a thousand eyes.”
— John Lyly
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 06:19 and sets at 18:17 in Guangzhou today, giving 11h 58m of daylight. Solar noon is at 12:18.
06:19
Sunrise
12:18
Noon
18:17
Sunset
Midnight
00:18
Sunrise
06:19
Solar noon
12:18
Sunset
18:17
Solar midnight
00:18
Daylight
11h 58m
Daylight runs about 13h 33m around the June solstice and 10h 42m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Guangzhou does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC+8 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
China has 3 public holidays in October 2026.
Architecture
Guangzhou built a new axis of towers along the Pearl River for the 2010 Asian Games, concentrating its modern architecture on the two banks that face each other across the water. Behind it the older Cantonese port keeps the guild halls and churches it grew up around.
Completed 2016
Kohn Pedersen Fox
A supertall tower in Zhujiang New Town, one of a pair of giants framing the axis. Kohn Pedersen Fox stepped the shaft back four times as it rises, each setback marking a change of use from shops to offices to hotel to apartments. The tapering profile sheds wind load and signals the stack of functions inside. It closed the skyline the district had been building toward for a decade.
Completed 2013
Joseph di Pasquale
An office building for a plastics exchange on the river's south side, built as a giant ring. Joseph di Pasquale set a hole through the centre so the disc and its reflection in the water read as a figure eight, a lucky doubling drawn from Chinese jade discs. The ring is a pair of towers joined top and bottom rather than a single mass. It is a landmark engineered entirely around a silhouette.
Completed 2010
Zaha Hadid
An opera house on the new civic axis in Zhujiang New Town. Zaha Hadid set two smooth stone volumes on the riverbank like boulders worn by water, their faces folded from glass and granite with no straight line held for long. The larger holds the auditorium, the smaller a rehearsal hall. It was the building that put her studio's flowing geometry onto a full civic scale in China.
Completed 2010
Mark Hemel & Barbara Kuit
A broadcast and observation tower across the river from the new business district. Mark Hemel and Barbara Kuit shaped it as a tall hyperboloid of steel latticework, wide at top and bottom and pinched to a narrow waist that gives it its local nickname. The twist between two offset ellipses does the structural work and the form at once. It was raised as the fixed marker the whole Asian Games axis was aimed at.
Completed 1894
Chen clan
An ancestral hall and academy built by the Chen lineage of Guangdong to house students sitting the imperial exams. The Chen clan funded it as a showcase of Cantonese craft, its roofs crowded with figures in coloured ceramic and its screens carved in openwork wood and stone. Nineteen halls and courtyards are strung along a strict axis. It survives as the fullest display of the region's building trades on one site.