The record for the tallest woman who ever lived is kept in London, by a publisher that began as a reference book for settling arguments in pubs. It has been held by two women in the last hundred and thirty years. Neither of them could stand up to her full height, and both of their record figures are therefore estimates rather than measurements.
Zeng Jinlian holds it now, at 246.3 cm. Jane Bunford, from Bartley Green in Birmingham, held it for the sixty years before her, at 241 cm. Understanding why both numbers are adjusted figures tells you more about this record than any of the biographical detail that usually fills articles on the subject, and it explains why the figure of 2.48 m that circulates for Zeng Jinlian is not the one Guinness publishes.
What Guinness actually ratified
Zeng Jinlian was born on 26 June 1964 in Yujiang village, in what was then the Bright Moon Commune, Hunan Province. She died on 13 February 1982. She was 17.
Guinness World Records gives her height as 246.3 cm, or 8 ft 1 in, recorded at the time of her death. That is the record figure, and it is the only one with an institution behind it.
The figure of 2.48 m appears in a great many places, including the earlier version of this article, and it does not appear in Guinness’s own record entry or in its 2025 account of her life. We have found no source for it that we can trace. It is 1.7 cm above the ratified figure, and given what follows about how that figure was arrived at, a stray 1.7 cm is not a small thing.
The curvature, and why that matters to the record
Zeng Jinlian had severe scoliosis. By the end of her life she could not straighten up and used a wheelchair.
This is where the record keeping becomes genuinely interesting. In 1981 Guinness declined to recognise her as the world’s tallest standing woman, precisely because of her spinal curvature. A standing measurement is what the record normally requires. She could not supply one.
So the 246.3 cm is not a figure taken by standing her against a wall. It is a reconstruction of what she would have measured if her spine had been straight. Guinness does not describe its method on the page, which is a gap worth naming: the organisation publishes heights to the nearest 0.001 cm as a matter of policy and here it publishes a figure to one decimal place with no account of how it was derived.
She became the tallest living person in 1981, after the death of Don Koehler, who had been slightly taller than her. She held that title for the few months left to her.
Jane Bunford, and the same problem in Birmingham
The woman Zeng Jinlian displaced had the identical difficulty, sixty years earlier and four thousand miles away.
Jane Bunford was born in Bartley Green, Birmingham, in 1895. At 11 she fell off her bicycle and fractured her skull. Her growth spurt began after the injury, and the presumption since has been that the fall damaged her pituitary gland, the same mechanism that drives most cases of this kind. The difference between her case and Zeng Jinlian’s is only that we know what started hers.
Her measurements, as Guinness gives them, run like this. At her thirteenth birthday she was 1.98 m. At her twenty-first, in 1916, she reached 2.39 m, which Guinness calls her peak standing height. Shortly before she died she measured 2.31 m, because by then her spine had curved. Her record height of 2.41 m is an estimate adjusted for that curvature. Her coffin was 2.5 m long.
She died on 1 April 1922, aged 26. After her father’s death in late 1916 she had moved into her brother’s house on Jiggins Lane in Bartley Green, and she lived there until the end.
Guinness still lists her as the tallest British person ever, of either sex.
And then her body went missing
The Bunford story has a second half that is not really about height at all, and it is worth telling because it sets a standard against which the treatment of Zeng Jinlian’s remains can be judged.
At her burial in 1922 her body was not in the coffin. Roughly fifty years later her skeleton was found on public display in the Anatomical Museum at the University of Birmingham. The 1971 Guinness book had listed it as an unidentified giantess. The university conceded that it was Jane Bunford, declined to say anything further, and stopped visitors photographing it. It remained on display until 2005, when her relatives were finally able to reclaim it. She was reburied without a headstone. How the body left the grave in the first place has never been established.
No photograph of her is known to exist. What does survive is a second record: her auburn hair, worn in two plaits, reached her ankles, a length of over eight feet, and it earned her an entry in the 1972 Guinness book for the longest hair.
Zeng Jinlian’s own measurements, and where they disagree
Her growth is usually presented as a clean line. It is not, and the sources do not agree.
| Age | Height, per Guinness | Height, per reference sources | Who took it |
|---|---|---|---|
| About 4 months | Abnormal growth begins | Abnormal growth begins | Family account |
| Under 4 | 156 cm | 156 cm | Not stated |
| 5 | Not given | Taller than her mother | Family account |
| 13 | 217 cm | 232 cm | Neither source names who measured her |
| 16 | Not given | 240 cm, and 147 kg | Routine diabetes check-up |
| 17, at death | 246.3 cm | 246.3 cm | Recorded 13 February 1982, adjusted for curvature |
The disagreement at 13 is 15 cm. That is not a rounding difference or a question of shoes. One of those two figures is wrong, and neither source says who held the tape.
The one measurement in the table taken by someone with a professional reason to be accurate is the 240 cm at 16, which came out of a routine appointment for her diabetes rather than out of anyone’s interest in records. That is the pattern across this whole subject: the trustworthy numbers are the incidental ones.
Her hands measured 25.5 cm and her feet 35.5 cm. Guinness carries both figures on its record page and presents them as reported by her family rather than measured. Her feet were about 2.5 cm longer than those of Tanya Herbert, who holds the current record for the largest feet on a living woman and who is 45 cm shorter than Zeng Jinlian was. We set those figures out in our article on who has the largest feet in the world.
Her family, and the question of inheritance
Her father was about 163 cm and her mother about 156 cm. Her brother was 158 cm at 18. Guinness concludes from this that her height was not genetic.
There is a complication on the same subject that Guinness does not address. A family genealogy cited in a 1981 account records a great-granduncle at 233 cm. If that is right, she is not the only person of extraordinary height in her line, and a flat statement that genetics played no part is harder to sustain. We give it as what it is: a family record, recorded sixty years or more after the fact, and not a measurement.
A smaller point of confusion is worth clearing up because it recurs. She had three brothers. Several accounts give her one brother and two sisters, apparently by reading a photograph.
The diagnosis, and what was and was not offered
She was diagnosed with gigantism, scoliosis and diabetes after puberty. Guinness notes that the usual cause of gigantism is a pituitary tumour but does not state that this was hers.
On treatment, the two accounts differ in a way that matters. Guinness says surgery was not an option because it “might have led to more fatal complications”. Reference sources say she declined brain surgery to remove the tumour. Those are not the same claim: one says it was not offered, the other says she refused it.
The earlier version of this article said her doctors wanted to treat her with radiation and that she always refused because she did not want to lose her hair. We have found no source for that, in Guinness or elsewhere, and it has been removed from the body of the article. It may well be true. It is not something we can stand behind.
What the mechanism actually does, and why timing decides whether a tumour makes a person tall or merely thickens them, is set out in our piece on Adam Rainer, the only person recorded as both a dwarf and a giant.
The comparison with Robert Wadlow, carefully
The claim made about Zeng Jinlian more than any other is that she would have overtaken Robert Wadlow, the tallest man ever at 272 cm, had she lived. The argument runs that she was taller than he had been at the same age, so she was on a steeper curve.
The trouble is that the comparison depends entirely on which set of figures you use for either of them, and both sets are contested.
Guinness gives Wadlow 245 cm at 17 and 8 ft at 16. Reference sources give him 224 cm at 13. The earlier version of this article put him at 218 cm at 13 and 240 cm at 16. For Zeng Jinlian the age-13 figure is either 217 cm or 232 cm depending on the source. Lay the uncertainties on top of each other and the two curves overlap for most of their length.
What can be said is narrower and still interesting. At 17, Zeng Jinlian was taller than Robert Wadlow had been at 17, by a centimetre or two, on the figures both organisations publish. Both were still growing when they died: he at 22, she at 17. Nobody can say what either would have reached, and Wadlow’s own last five years added 27 cm, which is a rate she would have had to match for five years she did not get.
Our ranking of the tallest men of all time explains what Guinness requires before it will ratify a figure, and our article on Robert Wadlow covers the brace and the infection that killed him.
How she died, and what happened afterwards
She died of complications of diabetes, in hospital care at Yuanjiang, where she had been since December 1981. Her doctors said she was still growing during those final months, though no measurement from that period has been published.
At her own wish her body was donated to the Human Morphology Science and Technological Museum at Central South University. That detail deserves to be set beside the Birmingham story: one woman’s skeleton went on public display for decades without her family’s knowledge or consent, and the other’s was given to a teaching collection because she asked for it to be. The two cases are a century apart and the difference is entirely one of consent.
Two women who may have been taller
Reference sources name Trijntje Keever, a Dutch girl of the 1630s, and Ella Ewing, an American of the late nineteenth century, as possibly taller than either Zeng Jinlian or Jane Bunford. Neither height can be verified, which is why neither holds the record.
That is the whole shape of this subject. The record does not go to the tallest woman who ever lived. It goes to the tallest woman whose height somebody wrote down in a way a London publisher will accept, and the current holder’s figure is an adjustment made after her death because the condition that made her tall also made her unmeasurable. The tallest living woman today, Rumeysa Gelgi, is about 30 cm shorter and is documented in incomparably more detail, which is covered in our profile of Rumeysa Gelgi.
Sources
- Guinness World Records, “Tallest woman ever”, for her height of 246.3 cm recorded at her death on 13 February 1982, her birth on 26 June 1964 at Yujiang in the Bright Moon Commune, the 156 cm figure before her fourth birthday, the 217 cm at 13, her hands at 25.5 cm and feet at 35.5 cm, her parents’ and brother’s heights, and the scoliosis and diabetes.
- Guinness World Records, “Zeng Jinlian: first woman to feature in the history of the world’s tallest people”, 18 February 2025, for the 246.3 cm figure, the diagnoses after puberty, the statement that surgery was not an option, the donation of her body to Central South University, and the tallest living person title following Don Koehler’s death.
- Reference entry on Zeng Jinlian, for the 232 cm at 13, the 240 cm and 147 kg at 16 taken at a routine diabetes appointment, Guinness’s refusal in 1981 to recognise her standing height because of her spinal curvature, the great-granduncle recorded at 233 cm, the hospital stay at Yuanjiang from December 1981, the refusal of brain surgery, the sibling count, and the cases of Trijntje Keever and Ella Ewing.
- Guinness World Records, “How the 7 ft 11 in former tallest woman’s body went missing for half a century”, July 2024, for Jane Bunford’s birth at Bartley Green in 1895 and death on 1 April 1922, the bicycle accident at 11, the heights of 1.98 m at 13, 2.39 m at 21 and 2.31 m before her death, the 2.41 m record as an estimate adjusted for curvature, the 2.5 m coffin, the house on Jiggins Lane, the ankle-length hair and the 1972 longest-hair record, the skeleton in the University of Birmingham Anatomical Museum until 2005, and her standing as the tallest British person ever.
- Guinness World Records, “Robert Wadlow, the tallest man ever”, January 2025, for his height of 272 cm, 8 ft at 16 and 245 cm at 17.
- Guinness World Records, “World’s largest feet a whopping size 18”, November 2022, for Tanya Herbert’s foot measurements, used for the comparison with Zeng Jinlian’s feet.