黄埔中心体育馆

The Huangpu Central Gymnasium sits in the north-eastern corner of Huangpu Sports Centre at 398 Fengle North Road, Huangpu District, and was built for the men's basketball preliminaries of the 2010 Asian Games. The sports centre itself was completed in 2001 at a cost of RMB 396 million on a site of about 170,000 square metres, with a stadium and a gymnasium as its two main buildings. The gymnasium was finished before the Games with about 31,690 square metres of floor area and a height of 22.4 metres, made up of a competition hall and a training hall, with 3,254 fixed seats and close to 5,000 once temporary seating was added for the Games. Its facade interweaves three motifs — banana leaf, broadleaf and bright sun — through vertical louvres and curved eaves that give it the spreading quality of a tropical plant, an unusual botanical theme among Guangzhou's Asian Games venues. During the Games it hosted the men's basketball group matches; afterwards it became the largest multi-purpose hall in Huangpu, able to take basketball, badminton, volleyball and table tennis as well as performances, exhibitions and community events, and it is run day to day by the Huangpu District Sports Development Centre with hourly public booking. The hall shares a campus with the Huangpu Stadium, which has 12,000 seats and a standard track and football pitch, so the two can jointly host larger meets and opening ceremonies. The campus is bounded by Zhendong Road to the east, Fengle Road to the west, Hulin Road to the south and the Guangyuan Expressway to the north, about 500 metres from Dashatou East station on metro line 5, with a bus terminus across Hulin Road, which helps crowd dispersal. For organisers the hall works as a sub-10,000-seat district arena: the seating scale is moderate, the floor can switch between basketball and performance modes, and the training hall can serve as backstage and warm-up space, suiting regional tournaments, corporate annual meetings, esports and mid-sized concerts; the constraint is age, since although the lighting and rigging were upgraded for the Asian Games, load capacity and hanging points for large shows still have to be checked event by event.