KEY POINTS:
Fireworks blazed along the Great Wall and across Beijing on Friday night, as Chinese president Hu Jintao opened the 29th Olympic Games at an opening ceremony built around an ancient Confucius saying: "friends have come from afar, how happy we are".
It has been nearly 2000 years since
philosopher Confucius wrote those words, but never have they been more apt for China, which has invited the world to Beijing in an unashamed bid to win international respect.
For more than four hours China used the opening ceremony to showcase all it had contributed to the world, from gunpowder, paper and calligraphy, to martial arts and silk.
A 16-tonne "one world, one dream" globe soared above the twisted steel of the Bird's Nest stadium to symbolise China's place in the modern world.
Five orchestras symbolised the five continents, and East met West when Chinese singer Liu Huan and British opera star Sarah Brightman sang You and Me, the Olympic theme song.
Among it all there was a taste of Kiwi as rower Mahe Drysdale, clad in a Maori cloak, led the New Zealand team into the stadium.
New Zealand entered the stadium with about 70 athletes of the 182 selected marching, and 35 support staff following.
About 100 New Zealand athletes based outside Beijing - in Hong Kong, Qingdao, Qinhuangdao and Shenyang - could not march, while others cried off to concentrate on competitions on Saturday.
Saturday's competitions did not stop Drysdale, who accepted the honour of being the flag bearer even though he is due on the water for his heats in the afternoon.
"In the end I thought of the lift it is going to give me," he said of his decision.
Thanks to an ordering system based on the number of brush strokes in the Chinese characters denoting country names, New Zealand was 189th of 205 teams into the stadium.
For almost two hours the teams of athletes followed Greece into the Bird's Nest, the exquisite stadium dressed up in its finest party clothes.
Chinese calligraphy promoted Guinea, Guinea Bissau and Turkey into the vanguard, behind 2004 Olympic hosts Greece, and dumped Morocco and Australia among the tailenders.
At least Zambia, which entered one place before hosts and tailenders China, would have felt it was occupying its usual place in the scheme of things.
As well as letters, the ceremony was big on numbers.
The ceremony started at 8.08pm (local time), on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008.
Eight is a lucky number in China, as it sounds like the word for fortune.
Beijing Organising Committee vice-president Wang Wei had earlier told reporters that he would have preferred the Games to have been in September, when the weather was more suitable.
On a day Wang had prayed would be clear, Beijing was cloaked in a smoggy haze, as if the 287-point fireworks display had already been activated and the smoke was still hanging around.
As well as eight, the numbers 2008 and 29 put in regular ceremonial appearances - 2008 for the year, 29 for Beijing being the 29th Olympiad.
And so there were 2008 performers beating Fou - an ancient Chinese percussion instrument - and singing "the rolling spring thunder of welcome".
And there were 29 colossal "burning footprints" stepping their way across the skyscrapers and traditional alleys of Beijing, from Tian'anmen Square in the heart of the city, all the way to the Bird's Nest in the far north.
Now it is time for the athletes to turn on a spectacular display of their own.
- Video courtesy of Television New Zealand www.tvnz.co.nz/beijing2008
