Jubilantly 'werid' wonders

Beijing's Golden Plaza resembles an ancient Chinese shoe-shaped gold ingot. Kuang Linhua / China Daily

Three gods. A booze bottle. And a massive mobile clasped by a huge hand.

Sounds like the start of a divine drunk-dial joke.

But, no, the punch line is these are buildings－specimens of China's unusual architecture.

Beijing's Tianzi hotel, Wuliangye's liquor factory in Sichuan province's Yibin and Xingyao Cellphone City in Yunnan's provincial capital Kunming were designed to look like said objects. (Tianzi won a Guinness World Record for biggest image building, Xinhua News Agency reports.)

Also purposefully wrought were the gargantuan ping-pong paddle in Anhui province's Huainan, the colossal ancient Chinese coin that's the Fangyuan Mansion in Liaoning province's capital Shenyang, and the violin-and-piano structure that's a music center in Huainan.

Same goes for both of China's teapot-shaped buildings. While not at all short yet very stout, the 10-story tourist information center in Jiangsu's Wuxi rotates.

Really.

Whereas these structures were shaped as such on purpose, Chongqing's "flying saucer," the "long johns" in Jiangsu province's Suzhou and the "sails" in Hainan province's Sanya weren't designed for the monikers they've produced.

Rather, their appellations are anthropomorphic designations netizens contrived as they looked at China's unorthodox buildings like Rorschach tests.

And their facades provide for plenty of jests.

President Xi Jinping called for a halt to the contruction of "weird" buildings at a recent meeting of creative types.