Beijing

It might be hard to cuddle a real panda here, but the capital has lots of cuddly pandas that are hard to resist hugging tightly.

In Panda Town the black-and-white creature puts on hats, coats and shoes, taking on different roles, such as Superman and Santa Claus.

A stuffed panda, with three long, curling eyelashes and bearing four flags in back, plays the role of Mu Guiying, an ancient heroic woman and about to put on a performance of Peking opera. She wears a delicate phoenix coronet and holds a special stick weapon in her hands.

More than 300 different manifestations of panda can be found in Panda Town - the brainchild of a team whose average age is 25.

"The 'Town' is a playground and our bosses lead to play games like throwing sandbags there," said Leng Yue, a staff member of them, "It stimulates our creative juice." And their upcoming creation is a panda dressed up as a rabbit to celebrate the arrival of the Chinese new year of the rabbit.

These high-profile pandas have already appeared in the film Panic Room, the comedy drama Evil wears Panda, and a bio comic Something about Pandas. Their next step is to produce a biopic.

The panda is also the favor of artists, being the star attractions from brush ink paintings to sculptures.

Self-described as "Panda Man", pioneer artist Zhao Bandi, brings pandas under the spotlight of contemporary art.

His latest works of sculpting art pieces with panda's stool have taken the field by storm. You can get a glimpse of the artist's other work at Bandi Panda at 798 Art Zone.

A series of colorful panda plush toys designed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics as mascot toys are on sale. Beside the color of black and white, these pandas adopt the color of the five rings, changing into blue, yellow, red and green. For the first time, pandas don't have to be upset about not making colorful pictures.

There is also a series of fashionable T-shirts and accessories, each a piece of his Bandi Panda fashion show collection released at China International Fashion Week in 2008.

Another panda in the art zone, wearing a red scarf and a Chinese red-starred military hat, leads customers to a cozy post office, Panda Mandy, literally "Panda Slow Post".

Here pandas are transformed into couriers, but instead of sending letters immediately, they safe keep letters until a special date in the future and send them off as pleasant surprises to the unsuspecting recipients.

"We choose the panda as our representative as its slow pace matches right up with pace of the delivery, neither too fast like kangaroos, nor too slow like snails," said Liu Wei, the founder of the slow letter post office, "And we also want to learn the candid and practical character of pandas."

There are more than 10,000 letters. The letter destined for farthest date in the future is to be mailed in 2069, written by a young couple, hoping to receive it on their 60th wedding anniversary.

The delivery price is a 29-yuan starting rate for letters delivered within one year, 10 yuan extra for one additional year and 59 yuan for three to nine years.