Imperial Russia built the park in 1898 in what was then Wesy Qingniwa Village, on the western edge of the city they called Dalini. They named it West Park. After Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and took control of the Liaodong Peninsula, the park expanded to include a sumo wrestling field, golf course, horse riding clubs, and swimming pools. A tiger kept on the grounds earned it a new name: Tiger Park. In 1925, a memorial tower for Japanese war dead was erected in the south, and the ashes from Asahi Square were relocated here. As the city grew around it, the park became Central Park in 1926. Japan's defeat in World War II brought Soviet influence, and on November 1, 1947, it became Lenin Park. Then, on the eve of the People's Republic, volunteers renovated the grounds and erected a monument inscribed with the words "Labor Creates the World." On March 3, 1949, the park received its current name.

Among the park's most unexpected treasures is a bronze bell cast in Korea in 1347, during the reign of the Yuan Dynasty's Emperor Toghon Temur. The bell's journey to Dalian began in 1905, when Abe Eizen, a Japanese Buddhist monk of the Togan Sect, arrived to establish a branch of Higashi Honganji Temple. Learning of the bell's existence in Incheon, Korea, he arranged through Japanese authorities to have it transferred to Dalian. In 1958, it was moved to Laodong Park, where it remains. Inscribed with Sanskrit text from the Aroni Mantra scripture, the blessing bell predates European contact with the Americas and has survived the collapse of the dynasty that commissioned it by nearly seven centuries.

Two structures tell distinctly Dalian stories. In the park's south stands a giant red-and-white soccer ball, 19.6 meters in diameter and 21 meters high, a tribute to the city's passion for professional football. Inside what looks like an oversized sports prop is actually the former Dalian Museum of Architectural Art, later converted into a revolving restaurant. More mysterious is the centennial warehouse, sealed on September 19, 1999, on the hundredth anniversary of Dalian's founding. It contained 100 objects of significance, a letter from then-President Jiang Zemin to then-Mayor Bo Xilai, and was meant to be opened in 2099 for the city's 200th anniversary. Between 2016 and 2017, the warehouse was quietly removed. The original site is now covered by colored bricks, and the whereabouts of its contents are unknown.

Three million visitors pass through Laodong Park each year, making it not just Dalian's oldest urban park but its most heavily used public space. The eastern lotus pond preserves the historical Qingniwa Bridge. Red-crowned cranes, peacocks, and sika deer inhabit enclosures in the western section. A viewing platform in the elevated southern terrain overlooks the CBD, while the western slope hosts the city's only urban ski resort, a 30,000-square-meter facility that operates on artificial snow each winter. Spring brings winter jasmine followed by cherry blossoms, including trees planted as symbols of Sino-Japanese friendship. Annual events cycle through tulip exhibitions, chrysanthemum shows, fireworks festivals, and lantern displays. The park sits just 500 meters from Dalian Railway Station and at the foot of Green Mountain, anchored so firmly in the city's center that no amount of renaming has ever dislodged it.