The People’s Grand Hall of Shunde in Guangdong province, designed in 1959 to hold a 5,000-person assembly, was built with the largest span (55.04m) for reinforced concrete thin-shelled roofs in China at the time. It was a remarkable achievement that commemorated the 10^th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Through the collation of historical archives, combined with oral history interviews and field investigations, the article investigates the construction process of the Grand Hall from idea to realization, especially its architectural design, structural calculation, and technical approach to construction, and discusses the relationship between local practice and technological flow. The authors then suggest that the Hall’s spatial design reflects the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou; the structural design reflects the shell structure of the South China Institute of Technology; and the calculation of the thin-shell structure reflects similar buildings in the Soviet Union. By combining indigenous and foreign methods, the largest county-level auditorium in China was built in only eleven months under very difficult conditions.