Today Xinhua reports that Beijing will start construction of a new “International Exhibition Center” to supersede the old one (pictured) on the city’s East Third Ring Road. Naturally, the new one is going to be bigger and better and full of socialist virtues.
To be constructed at a cost of RMB 29 billion, the new venue will have 650,000 square meters of floor space, and parking for more than 3,000 cars. The current International Exhibition Center has just over 60,000 square meters of floor space. The behemoth will arise out of the fiels of Shunyi county, about 1.5 kilometers away from the Capital Airport.
Construction is planned to start in September 2005 and to finish exactly one year later.
LINKS:
Xinhua: Beijing to start building new exhibition center in September (in Chinese)
Image taken from this People’s Daily Page. Curiously enough, using Baidu.com to search for images of the Exhibition Centre brings up a girlie pic hosted on Anhuinews.com, which appears to be a provincial government-owned website. Someone is having fun in Anhui as you can see from these pages in the “Women’s section”: 1, 2, 3 and 4.