The rusty, buckled, soot-stained veins of the number four blast furnace lie cold and silent. The towering smoke stacks exhale no more. Inside the cavernous body of the number three steel mill all is still and dark.
Beijing's biggest single source of pollution, the vast Shougang steel complex, has been sacrificed to the Olympics and, this week, the local government invited the world's media to a triumphant autopsy.
Located in the densely populated west of the city, very close to the Olympic velodrome, BMX venue and mountain bike course, Shougang is being heralded as a symbol of how the games is helping to green China.
At its recent peak, the factory employed 134,000 workers and belched out a 10th of the particulate matter that made Beijing's air among the foulest in the world.
But four of its five blast furnaces have been shut down in a pre-Olympic environmental clean-up that will shift into top gear tomorrow with the temporary closure of hundreds of factories and the removal of more than a million cars from the city's roads.
The drastic measures, arguably the most extreme environmental preparations for an Olympics, are a sign of the host's authoritarian powers and the scale of the pollution problems the city faces.
Three years ago, the European Space Agency released satellite data that showed the capital and surrounding areas in northern China had the worst levels of nitrogen dioxide in the world. The city is often cloaked in haze, which occasionally hits such noxious levels that the authorities warn children and elderly people to stay indoors.
The smog prompted the marathon world record-holder, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia, to pull out of the event because he has asthma. He is expected to concentrate instead on the 10,000m.
But Olympic organizers are determined that the sky will be blue in time for the opening ceremony on August 8. From Sunday, hundreds of construction sites and factories will be closed and police will oversee a traffic-control system designed to halve the traffic on the roads. The city's 3m cars will be allowed on the roads only on alternate days depending on whether their license plates are odd or even numbered.
It is the final stage in an air-conditioning operation that has lasted several years and has seen gas replace coal in millions of homes and a fleet of modern, clean-energy buses introduced on to the streets. This weekend Beijing will also unveil another of its three new subway lines.
Shougang is the showpiece environmental project. By the start of the Olympics, the factory, also known as Capital Steel, says it will have cut production at its Beijing plant by 73% and spent 140bn yuan (£10.3bn) on reducing pollution and improving energy efficiency.
About 60,000 workers at the state-owned firm are being laid off in a phased relocation to a plant outside the city.
"We are doing this because of the Olympics at a big financial cost," said Liu Zhangchun, the manager of the number four blast furnace. "Our factory is making a sacrifice without expecting anything in return. It is for blue skies and clearer water."
His message is reinforced by a red banner draped beside the defunct furnace: "To contribute to the Green Olympics, realise the promise, reduce production."
It comes too late for millions of Beijingers, whose health has been damaged over decades. Research by the company's environmental department showed that the firm formerly accounted for about 10% of the particulate matter in the capital.
The future looks brighter. By 2010, production of steel and iron at Shougang's complex in Beijing will cease for good. A new plant is under construction in Caofeidian, a vast plot of reclaimed land in Bohai Bay, north-eastern China, that is part of China's ambitious campaign to make its industry more environmentally friendly.
This is the post-Olympic future the government is keen for the world to see. For the moment, however, it faces the huge task of clearing the Beijing air before the arrival of 10,000 athletes. Despite the partial shutdown of Shougang and other plants, hundreds more still operate outside the capital. Yesterday, the Olympic city was once again shrouded in haze.
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