The skyscraper rises from the ground as if to contest the heavens in height.
Tips
history
From Mao Zedong's (毛泽东) 《沁园春·雪》(1936): 山舞银蛇，原驰蜡象，欲与天公试比高。(Mountains dance like silver serpents; the plains drive wax elephants — all wanting to measure heights with Heaven.) Mao surveys the snowbound Shaanxi landscape and projects his own ambition onto it. One of the most famous lines of 20th-century Chinese poetry.
usage
天公 = 'Lord of Heaven' (天老爷), a personification of the sky. The phrase carries bold, sometimes arrogant ambition — fitting for revolutionary rhetoric or describing tall skylines.
