Ageing Chinese bodybuilders keep old Beijing gym alive after decades
- The former railway factory workers built their equipment themselves out of scrap metal 40 years ago
- Founder opened the gym a year after China’s ban on ‘bourgeois and narcissistic’ bodybuilding was lifted
An old bicycle shed filled with rust-stained equipment, built decades ago from scrap metal, is home to one of Beijing’s longest surviving gyms. Up to eight men, mostly in their 60s, gather there each afternoon without fail, ready to pump iron.
Many of the club members were young men in their 20s and 30s when it was founded in 1984 by Zhang Wei, winner of Beijing’s first long-distance race in 1956 and a fellow worker at the state-owned Erqi railway carriage factory, according to current gym manager Xu Wei, 63.
Zhang had visited a hotel where some foreign athletes were staying and was impressed by their strength and musculature as they worked out. He made sketches of the equipment they were using, reproducing it later using scrap metal from the factory, Xu said.
“In the factory, there were many different specialised workers. For example, I was the fitter,” Xu said. “We had the electrician and the bricklayer to help us build the gym. We did it all by ourselves.”
Zhang opened his gym just one year after the government had lifted a ban on bodybuilding in place since 1953. The sport, which first emerged in China in the 1930s, was outlawed by the Communist Party because it was “bourgeois” and “narcissistic”. In 2018, four years after Zhang’s death, Xu moved the gym to its present home in southwest Beijing, with the help of his former colleagues.
The gym has never closed in its near 40-year history. Not even the Covid-19 pandemic could keep its 29 members – the oldest is 82 – away over the past year.
