北京体育馆

Beijing Gymnasium stands at Jia 2 Tiyuguan Road in Dongcheng District and belongs to the General Administration's Training Bureau. Completed on 21 October 1955 after construction began in 1954, with Soviet specialists among the principal designers, it was the first large multi-purpose indoor sports hall built in the People's Republic; the street it fronts, Tiyuguan Road, is named after it. The original complex had three main halls, for competition, swimming and practice, and by 2000 more than a dozen specialist training halls had been added, including facilities for athletics, football, table tennis, tennis, gymnastics, diving, weightlifting, badminton, volleyball and water polo. The site covers 16 hectares with nearly 33,000 square metres of floor area. The central competition hall has a 56-metre arched steel roof truss and a 25-metre internal height, with a floor 22.4 metres wide and 36.4 metres long, ringed by 20 rows of fixed seating for 6,000 spectators and suited to basketball, volleyball, table tennis and gymnastics. The swimming hall to the west has a 50 by 20 metre pool, 1.4 to 4.5 metres deep, eight lanes, a 7.5-metre diving platform and 2,000 seats. The practice hall to the east, with double-layer hardwood flooring for three basketball courts and 4,334 square metres of space, has housed the national gymnastics team since 2003, and the athletics ground to the south-west seats 5,000. What defines the venue is its role as a training base: by the early 2010s fourteen national squads trained here, covering men's and women's basketball and volleyball, table tennis, badminton, weightlifting, diving, gymnastics, swimming, athletics, synchronised swimming and trampoline. The Training Bureau's Hall of Honour opened in the south building in December 2006; at 1,900 square metres it was the sports world's first national patriotic education base. The facades are 1950s Soviet in manner, restrained in ornament and balanced in proportion, and in 2009 the bureau's fitness centre opened here for local residents. The site is a short walk from Tiyuguan Road and Tiantan East Road, about ten minutes on foot from Tiantandongmen station on metro line 5, with frequent buses along both streets.