Gait recognition plays a special role in visual surveillance due to its unique advantage, e.g. , long-distance, cross-view and non-cooperative recognition. However, it has not yet been widely applied. One reason for this awkwardness is the lack of a truly big dataset captured in practical outdoor scenarios. Here, the “big” at least means: (1) huge amount of gait videos; (2) sufficient subjects; (3) rich attributes; and (4) spatial and temporal variations. Moreover, most existing large-scale gait datasets are collected indoors, which have few challenges from real scenes, such as the dynamic and complex background clutters, illumination variations, vertical view variations, etc . In this article, we introduce a newly built big outdoor gait dataset, called CASIA-E. It contains more than one thousand people distributed over near one million videos. Each person involves 26 view angles and varied appearances caused by changes of bag carrying, dressing and walking styles. The videos are captured across five months and across three kinds of outdoor scenes. Soft biometric features are also recorded for all subjects including age, gender, height, weight, and nationality. Besides, we report an experimental benchmark and examine some meaningful problems that have not been well studied previously, e.g. , the influence of million-level training videos, vertical view angles, walking styles, and the thermal infrared modality. We believe that such a big outdoor dataset and the experimental benchmark will promote the development of gait recognition in both academic research and industrial applications.