成都市体育中心

The Chengdu Sports Centre stood at 11 Renmin Middle Road Section 1 in Qingyang District, in the Luomashi and Huangcheng area of the old city, on a site of 140 mu with a football ground of 39,225 seats. It was Chengdu's first comprehensive stadium capable of staging major athletics and football, begun in September 1987, completed on 28 December 1991 and opened in 1992, with two tiers of seating on the north and south sides and three on the east and west closing a full bowl. It quickly became a city landmark: the opening match of the inaugural professional Jia-A season in 1994 was played here, and Sichuan Quanxing turned Chengdu into a byword for a gold-medal football market, with the derby against Qingdao Hainiu on 12 November 1995, remembered as the Defence of Chengdu, drawing some 60,000 spectators into a ground designed for far fewer. It also hosted matches of the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup, World Cup qualifiers, national athletics championships and a long list of concerts, and for two decades it was the default venue for large events in the city. The turning point came in 2013, when renovation works uncovered Tang building foundations, the Ming palace of the Shu princes and the remains of Mochi pond; excavation ran to 2018 over about 49,000 square metres. In 2014 the area was designated the Chengdu Donghuamen Archaeological Site Park, renovation of the sports centre began in December 2016, the park first opened to citizens on 11 December 2022, and the outer site area opened formally on 20 July 2023, free of charge, from 7.30 am to 10 pm. Under the plan published in 2023 the inner area, the former sports centre building itself, is being developed for archaeological display. The Chengdu Sports Centre has therefore ceased to function as a competition venue: it is now a heritage park rather than a bookable stadium, and it is listed here mainly for tracing past events and for marking the site as closed.