Because heat can transfer due to diffusion, it is usually difficult to control heat flow. Accordingly this limits potential applications of heat, say, in solar cells. On the other hand, heat is often considered as waste energy in most cases like chip cooling; how to guide heat to leave efficiently is of great value for chip cooling. Therefore, it becomes particularly important to study how to control heat flow at will. For this purpose, we propose an attempt: by using soft-matter-based thermal metamaterials, it is shown that heat flow can be controlled similarly to light propagation, thus achieving controlled heat flow. These thermal metamaterials exhibit thermal properties that cannot be found in naturally occurring materials or chemical compounds, and they can be used to control the flow of heat almost at will, for example, guiding heat around an object as if the object does not exist (thermal cloak). The method to design such thermal metamaterials is transformation thermotics that is based on the method of coordinate transformation. This talk will present the research progress in both theoretical and experimental research on the above mentioned novel thermal properties of soft-matter-based thermal metamaterials designed or realized according to transformation thermotics. In the meantime, some relevant extensions are also mentioned, say,  concentrating heat into a particular region (thermal concentrator), apparently reversing the flow of heat from low temperature to high temperature (thermal inverter), and rotating heat flow (thermal rotator).