首都体育馆

Capital Indoor Stadium stands at 56 Zhongguancun South Street in Haidian District, at the north-east corner of Baishiqiao in western Beijing, a short walk from the National Library and the Zizhuyuan park. Built between 1966 and 1968, it was the first 10,000-seat indoor arena in the western half of the capital: in the 1960s Beijing's big halls were clustered at Tiyuguan Road in the south-east and at the Workers' Stadium in the east, and Zhou Enlai personally chose the Baishiqiao site to balance the city's sports geography. The arena has since become one of the very few venues to host both a Summer and a Winter Olympics, serving volleyball in 2008 and short-track speed skating and figure skating in 2022. The competition hall measures 99 by 112.2 metres in plan, with a clear height of 20.3 to 20.8 metres and a maximum floor of 40 by 88 metres. The floor can be converted between ice and timber, so the hall stages short-track, figure skating and ice hockey as well as gymnastics, basketball, volleyball, table tennis and concerts. The site covers 54,600 square metres and the original building has 54,707 square metres of floor area. After the Winter Games upgrade the wider Capital Indoor Stadium park reached roughly 200,000 square metres, organised into a southern cluster with the competition hall, a training hall, athletes' accommodation and an Olympic events centre, and a northern cluster with a skating hall and a multi-purpose training hall: six buildings and five ice sheets in total, with 15,000 seats including 80 accessible places. Architecturally the building keeps its 1960s flat double-curved steel space-frame roof, 122 metres east to west and 107 metres north to south. The 2018 refit followed a principle of repairing the old as it was, matching the colour and cut of the exterior stone to the original fabric, and the hall was listed in the first batch of Beijing's outstanding modern buildings in 2007. It reopened to the public on 16 July 2022, with public skating bookable through the China Ice and Snow mini-programme. The site sits on Zhongguancun South Street near Xizhimenwai Avenue, within walking distance of National Library station on metro line 4 and Baishiqiao South station on line 9.