鸟巢(niǎo cháo) - Bird's Nest (Beijing National Stadium) in Mandarin

鸟巢 (niǎo cháo) is the nickname of the Beijing National Stadium, home of the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. 鸟 (niǎo) means "bird" and 巢 (cháo) means "nest", a plain description of the building's tangled steel lattice, which really does look like a woven nest from the outside.

Its formal name is 国家体育场 (guójiā tǐyùchǎng), "National Stadium", but almost nobody uses that in conversation; 鸟巢 (niǎo cháo) is what appears on maps, tickets and in everyday speech, alongside its near neighbour 水立方 (shuǐlìfāng), "Water Cube", the aquatics centre built for the same games.

It's a handy example of how Chinese place names often work by description rather than transliteration: rather than borrowing a foreign sound the way 新加坡 (xīn jiā pō) does for "Singapore", 鸟巢 (niǎo cháo) simply names what the building looks like, and everyone understands instantly.