Modelled on Stamford Bridge

The stadium began as an instrument of colonial municipal life. It was started in 1920 by the Tianjin British concession municipal council at 83 Chongqing Road, and its 1926 rebuilding was modelled on Stamford Bridge in London, with Eric Liddell helping the work while he was a missionary in Tianjin. Liddell is the athlete whose refusal to run on a Sunday became the film Chariots of Fire, and his presence on the building site is the kind of detail that connects a sports ground in north China to a story told around the world. The rebuilt ground could hold nearly 20,000 people in wooden stands over a site of about 33,000 square metres.

For most of the twentieth century it was the city's principal sports ground. It reopened on 6 October 1926 and hosted the international athletics games in 1929, and English-language sources record that it held 18,000 spectators and was the home ground of Tianjin Teda until the Teda football stadium opened in 2004. In 1943, at the end of the concession period, it was renamed the second municipal stadium of Tianjin. A ground that passes from a concession council to a municipal government to a football club and finally to a public square is a compact history of how the city's public spaces changed hands and purposes.

After the 1976 Tangshan earthquake the stadium was closed and used to house victims of the quake, and a major repair ran from 1979 to 1982. It served as a football ground for another two decades and then changed character entirely: in 2012 the city government started a conversion project, and the remodelled Minyuan Square opened on 1 May 2014 as an open public space. The conversion kept the old stand structure and the facade, so the shape of the stadium survives inside a square, which is a more careful outcome than demolition. The change also made the ground the anchor for Wudadao's tourist development.