中央体育场

Central Stadium, preserved as the Central Stadium site, stands at No. 8 Linggu Temple Road in Xiaolingwei subdistrict, Xuanwu district, Nanjing, inside the campus of Nanjing Sport Institute within the Zhongshan Mausoleum scenic area. It is the great multi-sport complex built in the Republican era. After 1928 the government set aside about 80 hectares, or 1,200 mu, south of Linggu Temple to host the national games; the foundation stone was laid on 10 May 1931, with design by Guan Songsheng and Yang Tingbao of Jitai Engineering and construction by Liyuan Building Company, and the complex was completed in 1933 at a cost of more than 1.4 million yuan. It comprises an athletics stadium, a Chinese martial arts arena, basketball courts, a swimming pool, a baseball field, tennis courts, a football pitch and a racecourse, and could admit 60,000 spectators at once. Everything is built in reinforced concrete but decorated with traditional Chinese motifs, and the entrances take the form of Chinese ceremonial archways, making the site a landmark of Sino-Western architectural fusion and the largest stadium in China and the Far East at the time. On 10 October 1933 the fifth National Games opened here with more than 2,000 athletes from 33 delegations, including sprinter Liu Changchun, who had travelled secretly from the Japanese-occupied northeast. In 1956 Nanjing Sports School was founded on the site and grew into Nanjing Sport Institute, which has since produced 16 Olympic champions and 106 world champions. The site was listed as a national key cultural relic in 2006, joined the second batch of China's 20th-century architectural heritage in 2017, saw its martial arts arena restored in 2018, and has opened to booked public visits since 2024. The track, stands and archways remain in use as a living monument to Chinese sport.