China Helped Build a 30-Story Tower in Bangkok. It Was the Only One That Fell
October 13, 2026 · 19 min
On 28 March 2025 a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck central Myanmar. More than a thousand kilometres away, Bangkok swayed. Inspectors later logged minor cracks in 169 buildings. One building did not survive: a 137-metre, 30-story government tower under construction, which dropped into its own footprint in roughly 8 seconds and killed 96 people, almost all of them workers on the site.
The core argument is that the earthquake did not cause the collapse in any useful sense. It tested every tower in the city at the same moment, and exactly one failed. Whatever brought it down was already inside the building.
The building and its builders
- The tower was the new headquarters of the State Audit Office of Thailand, in the Chatuchak district.
- The budget was 2.136 billion baht, about 63 million dollars. The winning bid was roughly 15% below the average estimate.
- It was built by a joint venture of Italian-Thai Development and China Railway No. 10, an arm of the state-owned China Railway Engineering Corporation, working through a Thai subsidiary.
- The design came from firms based in Thailand, and a separate Thai consortium supervised the work. One group drew it, one built it, one was paid to watch.
- Construction began in 2020 and the structure topped out in April 2024.
Why a distant earthquake threatens tall buildings
Over long distances, rock absorbs fast vibrations and lets slow ones through. Bangkok also sits on a thick layer of soft marine clay, which slows those waves and makes the ground move further, much as an old lakebed did in Mexico City in 1985. A 30-story tower naturally sways about once every 3 seconds, close to the rhythm of those slow waves. That is resonance, and it makes the sway grow.
Why that does not explain it
Other towers of similar height stand on the same clay and were hit by the same waves. None fell. They are built around a stiff core with reinforcement that lets the structure bend, crack and absorb energy while still standing. Engineers call this ductility. The 169 damage reports were the system working.
The steel that was not the answer
Early tests on rebar from the wreckage failed the national standard, and some steel was traced to Xin Ke Yuan, a Chinese-owned mill in Rayong that used induction furnaces. The mill denied supplying the joint venture. After a second round of lab work, all 41,635 seized bars were found to comply with the Thai standard, though a separate batch of 2,690 failed. The official investigation said the steel itself was not substandard. The problem was how it had been cut and installed.
The four official findings
Announced on 30 June 2025 and based on debris inspections and university simulations:
- The failure began on floors 1 to 4, in the shear walls around the lifts and stairs.
- Concrete samples from those walls tested, on average, below the design strength.
- The detailed construction drawings did not comply with the law.
- The bars tying the link beams into the shear walls were anchored shorter than the law requires.
With the core gone at the base, the floors came down flat in a pancake collapse.
The paperwork and the court case
According to the contractor, the plans were revised nine times, and one revision thinned the core walls around the lift shaft from 30 centimetres to 25. A supervising engineer says his signature on design-change documents was forged. In August 2025 prosecutors indicted 23 people and companies over design, supervision and construction. The lead defendants deny the charges, and nobody has been convicted.
Key takeaways
- The tower was the only building in Thailand destroyed by the earthquake, and 96 people died.
- Soft soil and resonance were real, but every other tall building in Bangkok survived them.
- The official findings point to the core: weak concrete, non-compliant drawings and short anchorage.
- This was not a simple case of bad Chinese steel. The design was Thai, the builders were a Thai-Chinese joint venture, and the blame is shared.
- The case is still before the court, and responsibility has not yet been divided.
More from the channel: @ChinaUnderStress