Charred CCTV Building

On the evening of February 9, 2009, I had some Chinese friends over for dinner to celebrate "Lantern Festival", the last official day of Chinese New Year, and more importantly the last day that people can legally set off their massive stashes of fireworks in most Chinese cities. One of my friends left around 10:30pm, and a few minutes later she sent me an SMS and said "Quick, turn on the TV... CCTV is on fire!" My heart sank, as my initial thought was that the visionary albeit awkwardly shaped main CCTV building that had been under construction for several years was now engulfed in flames. We turned on the TV, but couldn't find any news. We then turned to the Internet, where a number of people were already uploading pictures and low-quality videos of the fire. It turns out it was the building next to the main CCTV building, an auxiliary building for CCTV and also home to the new Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The building was also brand new and had yet to open to the public. And boy was it burning. Relieved that it wasn't the main building, I was still a little depressed the rest of the night to think of all the years of hard work that went into that building, from the architects to the engineers to the workers. Blood, sweat, and tears all down the drain in the course of a few hours. And the culprit. CCTV themselves. They had been doing a fireworks show there in front of the buildings the last several years, and every year it got more and more extravagant. So with fireworks exploding all around the building, and evidently with the building still completely unfinished and some of the flammable sound proofing material used heavily in the building's construction exposed to the shower of sparks, the building lit up like a Christmas tree (or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say a Chinese lantern in this case) in no time. My heart goes out to all of those who invested the last several years of their lives putting up this building, but I can't say I have too much sympathy for CCTV, who failed to even cover their own story. Which is why since I couldn't see pictures of the building on the news, I decided to go down and take a handful of pictures myself a few days after the fire. It was eerie seeing life going on as normal with the charred remains of the grand new building looming in the background. Occasionally a passerby would look up with saddened eyes or point it out to their friend, but for the most part like everything else here it was just old news by the second day. Despite the best efforts by CCTV and Chinese authorities to make it no news at all.