Tiananmen Square - June 4, 2008. 

Pictures by David Gray. 

After a disarmingly cool Beijing spring, summer hit the Olympics host city like a hammer this past weekend, marking the psychological final stretch to the Games.Across the city, kites fill the skies, cold drink sales pick up and bicycle ice cream vendors pedal the streets and lanes to provide relief from the pounding heat.

But if there is anything that defines summer in China’s capital when the mercury rises, its the near ubiquitous outpouring of Beijing bellies.

Sure, as is the fashion in other metropolises, women in Beijing wear tops that suggestively expose their midriffs.

But what sets Chinese men apart is that they are no less shy about baring their belly flesh. With shirts hiked to mid-rift range — but rarely taken off completely — they proudly sport pot bellies, thin bellies, sagging bellies, even rippling buff bellies, for all the world to admire.

Foreign visitors arriving for the Olympics in early August, still among the hottest and stickiest times of the summer, will no doubt have a chance to gaze and wonder at this cultural trait.

It’s common to see a cluster of men huddled around a game board at a park or a pair here and there lounging outside a shop while exchanging some local gossip or chatting about a news event. Some men rest their hands on the oval bulges and rub the sides as if admiring a prize watermelon.

Although some men become a tad self-conscious if asked to be photographed or if they are questioned about the habit, others will beam with delight at the attention.

Maybe by the end of the Games, Beijing’s city authorities can hold an exhibition event on the sidelines of the Olympics — an honorary gold medal for best Beijing Belly.

Photo of the full monty by REUTERS/Guang Niu. For a taste of the more popular partial  exposure, check this out.

This weekend, Beijing inaugurated the new Bird’s Nest Stadium with the “Good Luck Beijing” track and field event. I attended less than 24 hours after covering the earthquake in Sichuan, and the contrast between sports and rubble was a little hard to digest.

The Bird’s Nest stadium, built for the Olympics, can seat 91,000 fans. The air flows through well, keeping it cool in the muggy Beijing summer. The seats are well-positioned, so the contestants can be seen easily. The screens are visible, the sound-system clear, the lighting strong but not harsh.

The Mianyang stadium, in Sichuan, is currently housing nearly 20,000 refugees. Every railing is covered in clothing, the floors covered in cardboard and quilts. The glassed-in second story helps shield old people and children from the rain. The screens are tuned to television coverage of the disaster and the PA system booms out the radio news.

Lucky Beijing, Unlucky Sichuan.

But the two stadiums have some things in common.

A small army of young volunteers works in each. Fresh faced volunteers in Beijing answered the call to help China’s Olympics make a shining impression on the world. Masked volunteers in Mianyang answered the call to serve fellow Chinese in an hour of need.

Lines for snack food in Beijing’s stadium are polite and orderly, in line with campaigns for “cultured queuing.”

Lines for food in Mianyang are also polite and orderly, but a lot longer, as refugees show enormous patience despite hunger and grief.

Taxis pull over on the road outside the Bird’s Nest, so that people can take photos of themselves in front of the Olympic icon.

Cars pull over on the road outside the Mianyang station, to drop off donations of clothing and water.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought the applause of the Beijing crowd got a little warmer when the blue-suited Sichuan contestants won.

Pictures of scenes from Mianyang Stadium by Jianan Yu, Bird’s Nest by David Gray

Watching athletics at the“Bird’s Nest” National Stadium is a dream for many Chinese people but it turned into nightmare for me last weekend.

We set off last Friday to see the titanic building and a relatively low-key athletics meeting mainly contested by young Chinese athletes.

There were, however, still tens of thousands of people at the showpiece venue for Beijing Olympics, most of whom were looking forward to a first glimpse inside the stadium and to watching their hero Liu Xiang in action.

But our passions gradually died long before we entered the Bird’s Nest.

It took us nearly one and a half hours from seeing the stadium from the road to actually getting anywhere near it.

Every junction was gridlocked and we had to drive another 3 kms further down the fourth ring road, which runs alongside the Olympic Green, to find a place to turn around.

Twenty minutes later, we reached an entrance of the stadium only to find that there was no parking lot.

“Go! Go straight!” one cop shouted to us at a crossroads. Several more shouted the same phrase at us as we continued and we drove more than 2 km more before finally parking our car in a temporary “car park” on the curb as the cops directed.

From there it should have been 15 minutes walk to our destination but we were not that lucky. Heading back to the entrance we had past earlier, we found chaos with hundreds of people milling around.

“Closed! Closed! There are too many people! We can’t bear it!” one officials shouted. “We will take you to another entrance soon, by free bus!”

Less than a minute later, an empty bus arrived but there was only room to take a very small portion of the anxious crowd. The others stood in lines, waiting for another bus.

Officials, police and volunteers shouted through loudspeakers, asking people to keep calm and orderly.

But they seemed incredibly anxious themselves, as if they were surprised to see so many people. All this with a crowd of only about 30,000 making its way into the 91,000-seater stadium.

“I can’t imagine what will happen here when the Olympic Games come,” said one man standing close to me. “They should be prepared for the event better than this.”

At one stage, some people behind us in the queue suddenly ran back to the gate, saying that it had been re-opened. We decided to wait on.

The second bus came ten minutes later and took us by a circuitous route to another gate on the opposite side of the stadium.

From there it was another 15-minute walk, through at least three security checkpoints, before reached the Bird’s Nest at last.

It was 8:30pm by then, one and a half hours after the action had started.

Another curious thing happened in the stadium when the athletes were being introduced.

“Lane one…” the announcer said. “From China!” (who?)

“Lane two…from China!” (who? again)

“Lane three…from China!”

Oh God, I know we Chinese don’t have lots of good runners besides Liu, but they could have found a list of their names.

Pictures by David Gray 

The tenor of China’s Olympic year changed dramatically over the past two weeks.

What had been a building crescendo of celebration and national pride turned into an outpouring of grief and support for the earthquake-hit province of Sichuan.

Wall-to-wall television coverage of the torch relay, a blissful affair once on Chinese soil, gave way to heart-rending reports from the devastated epicentre and uplifting scenes of a nation pulling together to confront disaster.

And though the declared three-day period of national mourning has ended, China will carry its grief into the Olympics.

But if there were any questions about whether Beijing would, bit by bit, shift itself back into gear for the Games, these were put to rest for me the other night on the subway.

As I walked into Fuxingmen station, on the edge of downtown, I came upon a scene of the feverish yet meticulous work that has characterised Beijing’s Olympic preparations.

Two dozen high-school boys were running round and round in tight circles through the turnstiles. They were testing the resilience of a new ticketing system. With magnetic swipe cards in hand, they ran, one after the other, through the automatic turnstiles non-stop for nearly half an hour.

The system performed perfectly - and so did the students. Apart from some laughter and joking on the sidelines, the turnstile runners took to their task with determination and earnestness. It was a striking juxtaposition with the thousands of Chinese who have gone to Sichuan to lend a hand to the earthquake relief efforts.

I asked one of the students in the subway station if he was getting paid. “Of course not! We’re volunteers,” he said. “Everybody has to do their part for the Olympics and for China.”

Picture of Olympic countdown board in Beichuan by REUTERS/Bo Bor, Beijing subway map by REUTERS/Jason Lee  

I was one of the first foreign reporters on the scene after a devastating earthquake hit the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan on May 12.

It all seemed so normal when I arrived in the provincial capital Chengdu, some 12 hours after the 7.9 magnitude tremor hit, that I thought maybe the area had got off lightly. But heading in the hard hit town of Dujiangyan, just north of Chengdu, two hours after arriving in Sichuan, I realised how bad the situation was.

Dujiangyan looked like a war zone. There wasn’t a building that had not been damaged. Some had lost just a wall, or had a few cracks. Others had crumpled into the ground, as though a giant foot had descended from out of the sky and stamped on them.

Survivors, for the main part, either stood around in a state of total shock, or huddled together in tents, buses and cars, trying to avoid the drizzle that made what was already a depressing scene a thoroughly miserable and distressing one.

We had heard that a school in the town had collapsed. Finding it was not a problem — everyone could point the way there.

Having seen bodies lying in the streets I thought I would be emotionally and mentally prepared for what I would see next. I was wrong.

Soldiers and police had formed a cordon around the school to prevent overwrought relatives from rushing onto the rubble and look for their children themselves. In none of my stories from Dujiangyan did I quote one of these relatives directly.

I couldn’t talk to them; it upset me too much. I tried, but when I thought I might burst into tears myself, I had to look away, almost ashamed that I was unable to perform the job that I had been sent there to do — report.

In the days that followed what impressed me most was the huge outpouring of kindness from people in cities like Chengdu which had not been as badly affected by the quake.

At one refugee centre at a stadium in the city of Mianyang, where thousands had sought shelter, I saw an endless stream of voulunteers coming in bringing whatever they thought would help.

One lady from a village next to the stadium had cooked up a huge vat of rice porridge and brought it over on the back of her tricycle, and was busy handing it out to anyone who wanted it. “I just had to help,” she told me.

Others brought in bags of clothes, bottles of water and packs of instant noodles. One volunteer tried to give me some water, saying she thought I looked like a “hard-pressed reporter”. I was touched by the sentiment, but could only decline and insist she give the bottles to survivors, who needed it a lot more than me.

In the last few months a swirl of bad publicity has surrounded China in the run-up to this summer’s Beijing Olympics — notably with the problems in Tibet and the violence that accompanied parts of the international leg of the Olympic torch relay. It will be interesting to see how global public opinion, if you can call it that, will be affected by this earthquake, and if the almost incessant criticism of China now ends, or at least abates for a while.

Pictures of relatives trying to enter a collapsed school building and resident walking past a row of destroyed houses, both in Dujiangyan, by Claro Cortes IV/Reuters

If the word around camp is anything to go by, the final assault on the summit of Everest will begin in the early hours of Thursday morning. Journalists and accompanying officials have spent much of the day taking souvenir photos and snapping up post cards at the “world’s highest post office”.

The rumours would appear to be based on nothing more than collective will (or hysteria, perhaps).

A brief flurry of concern fizzed around camp when, after two days of clear skies, the wind picked up and clouds blocked our view of Everest.

This project is no walk in the park, though, as the climbers hanging around here are keen to emphasise.

But optimism remains that by mid-morning tomorrow, the mighty achievement may have been accomplished.

Dave and I will be keeping our fingers crossed. Mark, being a South African, is holding his thumbs.

China mountaineering team spokesman Zhang Zhijian details on a diagram the proposed route for the Olympic torch’s ascent of the world’s highest mountain Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma. Photo by David Gray.

You’ll never guess who I met at Base Camp.

After a quick stop to watch the monks and nuns at the Rongpo monastery at prayer this morning, we finally got up to Base Camp proper this afternoon.

It was pretty bleak. Basically, a cluster of tents on an exposed rocky flat. It made us feel almost grateful for our humble cabins back at the media centre.

The views, as always, were a compensation.

I was trying to get a couple of basic facts from an official whose English was as good as my Chinese when we reached the point of non-communication.

I turned around to find someone to help me out with translation and found a willing soul who I assumed to be from the corps of Chinese media at the camp.

He translated and nodded in reply to my cheery “thanks mate”.

Next thing I knew, though, three Chinese women journalists were squealing like schoolgirls and posing for pictures with my interpreter.

Turns out this was Zhang Chao Yang, CEO of Chinese web portal Sohu and hero to China’s vast young army of netizens (couldn’t someone invent a new name for web users?).

Once we repaired to a nearby tent for tea, Zhang told me he was not only at base camp because Sohu was a media partner of the Everest leg of the torch relay, but also because he was a keen climber himself.

He has climbed a fair few mountains himself and been to 6,666m on Everest. He didn’t fancy going all the way to the top, though, because he thought it might damage the brain which has made his fortune.

I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if there were at least some celebrity involvement with this great adventure.

Ed adds: Our team have to tough it out for a few more days at Everest. You’d think by looking at the pictures the weather is lovely, right? Wrong. Apparently it’s blowing a gale up there, so at the very earliest it’ll be Saturday before there’s any action. Read Nick’s story.

And by the way, we’ve hit the 100-day countdown till the start of the Games. For all our Olympic stories, take a look at our website .

Pix from the top (l-r). Armed Chinese border police stand in formation at a camp near the base camp of Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma April 30, 2008. Buddhist monks and nuns pray as they sit in the temple of Rongbo Monastery situated at the foot Everest. Yaks laden with supplies walk past the large camp for the Olympic torch’s ascent of Everest, also known as Qomolangma, in the Tibet Autonomous Region April 30, 2008. Chinese journalists taking it easy. And the Reuters team … Mark, Dave and Nick (tough job guys!: Ed). All snaps by David Gray.

More negotiations over whether we should delay our departure for base camp kept us off the road for an extra couple of hours and stretched the patience of the Chinese journalists.

All was forgotten, though, a couple of hours later when got our first real look at Everest from the top of a pass.

Arrayed in front of us was not only the famous mountain itself but four more of the world’s 14 8,000m-plus peaks.

It was a whole lot more impressive than I had thought it would be. I was not really aware of how much my concept of a mountain had been based on Everest itself.

Two hours later, we were at Rongpo Monastery (5010m) where the Everest Base Camp media centre is located.

There followed a frustrating evening and the first casualty of our rapid rise to altitude, read more about it here.

Pix from the top: The peak of Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma, can be seen behind the Olympic flag (R) as it flies next to the Chinese national flag (C) and the official Beijing Olympic Games flag on the outskirts of Everest Base Camp April 28, 2008. Foreign and local journalists look from an observation point at Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma, near the township of Shegar. A Chinese policeman salutes as a convoy of official Chinese government vehicles passes his checkpoint near Mount Everest. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA)

Remarkably we managed to get to our night stop, Tingri (4,300m), in time for lunch.

There was one morning diversion to visit Pu Bu, a model farmer who showed off the two story house he had built in the last few years.

He was 63 but typically looked much older. The Tibetan environment is unforgiving and adds a decade or two to the complexion, especially if your work is on the land.

Crying off the afternoon excursion, photographer David Gray and I headed down to new Tingri so he could file some pictures at an Internet café.

Strolling down the main street with a couple of our interpreters, we were greeted with cheery smiles by almost everybody and the odd “hello!” from children of school age.

One girl cycled past wearing a blue woolly hat with “Everton” written in white across the front. She was not nearly as impressed as I was by the fact that I should have come across a fan of Liverpool’s second soccer club so far away from England.

The elderly Tibetan man stands in his house near the Tibetan town of Shegar April 27, 2008. REUTERS/David Gray (CHINA)