Adding specific grist to Chan’s pronouncements, a new cultural centre – arrestingly designed by Zaha Hadid Architects – is fast taking shape in the west of Changsha, its shimmering, swooping roofs rising like waves from nearby Meixi Lake. Rather than yet another office block, shopping mall, deluxe apartment complex or extension to the city’s swish bilingual metro line, this is a cerebral development as well as being a mini architectural masterpiece.

Properly called the Changsha Meixihu International Culture & Arts Centre, it’s the firm’s second trophy project in China, following on from the innovative ‘double pebble’ design for the Guangzhou Opera House, which opened in 2010 with a performance of Puccini’s Turandot directed by the American filmmaker Shahar Stroh. The complex – whose initial concept was sketched out by Anglo-Iraqi Dame Zaha prior to her untimely death last March – is centred around an 1,800-seat grand theatre, which will play counterpoint to a contemporary art museum. A multi-purpose hall with a capacity of 500 and attendant restaurants and shops complete the RMB 2.4 billion package – a structure unequalled in Changsha in all the millennia of its existence.

‘This is a fabulous endeavour, an amazing technical achievement and a real milestone for Changsha,’ says Simon Yu Kam-man, Zaha Hadid’s project director. ‘We broke ground in 2012, and the centre is due to open in June, but it’s been really incredible to see the area around the site grow as we’ve been building. There are new offices and houses, where people are going to live and work, and come to the cultural centre, too. It’s like watching a whole new metropolis grow up, a sort of Atlantis in reverse.’