The Puppet Museum and the gigantic New Century Global Center

Chinese shadow theatre and puppetry are very popular in south-western China, as is evident when visiting the Chengdu Museum, a must-see stop for delving deep into cultural heritage. It exhibits almost 300,000 objects including historical artefacts, puppets, masterpieces of modern and contemporary painting and calligraphy spanning a historical period from the Neolithic to the birth of the People's Republic of China. In particular, within this exhibition space with its very contemporary architecture, covering an area of more than eleven thousand square metres, one is struck by the ceramic miniatures of courtyards of dwellings dating back to the late Shu period, the agate snuff boxes from the Ming dynasty, and above all the collection of local folk costumes. The New Century Global Center has also contributed to making Chengdu universally known because it is the world's largest multi-storey covered building (there are 18 of them) in terms of volume: designed by the French studio ADP Ingénierie, it flanks the Centre for Contemporary Art designed by Zaha Hadid, its silhouette recalling the shape of a gigantic pagoda 500 metres long and 400 metres wide. It houses shops, restaurants, the InterContinental Hotel where one can stay in one of its more than one thousand rooms, an IMAX cinema, a water park and even an ice-skating rink.