A landmark opera house in China has won a top international award from Britain's leading architectural organization for the excellence of its design.

The new Guangzhou Opera House, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, won as the best cultural building at the 2011 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) International Awards.

A spokesman for the RIBA said that the award was in recognition of the opera house's outstanding excellence.

The building was designed by one of the world's most cutting edge architects -- Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, whose team of architects is based in London.

Project architect Simon Yu, Scottish-born and of Chinese heritage, described how long the process took.

"The project was launched through a competition run by the Guangzhou Municipal Government back in 2002. There were a total of nine competitors invited to compete and bid for the opera house project and we had won that project as a result."

Construction of the ground-breaking design began in 2005 and took five years. It opened, to immediate acclaim, in 2010 with a production of a Western opera with a Chinese setting, Puccini's "Turandot."

The opera hall is suitable for performances of Chinese opera, as well as opera from the Western tradition.

The opera house looks very 21st century, like two pebbles washed up on the shore of the Pearl River, which runs through Guangzhou. The Guangzhou Municipal government wanted the building to become a cultural landmark and the architects involved in the project think they have achieved that.

"I think they were looking for a cultural landmark to play a key leading cultural role within the new masterplan that they had envisioned for the city," Yu said.

Yu described the opera house as a building that is very open to the public.

"This building is an opera house seen as a civic building, a civic landmark," Yu said, "so the building itself is unusual in the sense that we took a strategy which, like most of our projects from Zaha Hadid Architects, plays a huge civic role."

The building has been hailed by leading international architectural experts as perhaps one of the world's most spectacular opera houses.

British writer Jonathan Glancey described the building's interior as a "wonder" that certainly makes an impact.

"It can be admired from all around it," Glancey said. "It gives a sort of different view, a different interpretation from every angle."