四川科技馆

This guide to the Sichuan Science and Technology Museum in Chengdu traces one building through three completely different lives. It opens in 1968, with workers racing to finish a hall built to glorify Mao Zedong Thought, then follows it into 1979 as slogans came down and it reopened as a plain provincial exhibition hall for trade fairs and official displays. You'll hear how, a quarter century later, provincial leaders decided this aging hall should start selling something else entirely, and what it took to turn it into a free public museum. Stand at the entrance and you're standing on the same footprint those 1968 workers poured.