Beijing opened the Paralympic Games in spectacular fashion on Saturday, the crowd at the Bird’s Nest roaring in approval at the lavish performance overseen by renowned Chinese film director Zhang Yimou.

Particularly well received was a moving ballet performance by a young girl who lost a leg in May’s massive Sichuan earthquake.

Check out the photos and click here to read Ben Blanchard’s view from the Bird’s Nest…

Reuters photos by Jason Lee (top two) and Claro Cortes IV (bottom)

First it was the fireworks (see below). Now it turns out the opening ceremony to the Beijing Games had its very own Audrey Hepburn moment.

Nine-year-old Lin Miaoke, who was celebrated across China as the angelic voice with the adorable face who sang “Ode to the Motherland” at Friday’s ceremony, was merely a photogenic stand-in for the real singer, who was rejected because of her appearance.

A director of the opening ceremony, Chen Qigang, said Lin’s voice was overdubbed by the singing of the real child singer Yang Peiyi.

This is nothing new in the world of showbiz, of course. Marni Nixon provided the singing voice for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Deborah Kerr in The King and I. (Would you call her an unsung hero?)

But a search on Google Blogs found a lot of critical reaction. Here are a couple of representative examples:

New York Chique: Frankly, I think that’s disgusting. Honestly- they’re 7 and 9 years old! So young! and I can’t believe that they picked one little Chinese girl over another. In my opinion, they were both adorable.

Charles Lee: For me, I think it is another social commentary on the value of image over substance in humanity.

There’s an excellent piece by Jo Ling Ken, including some Chinese reaction, at Dispatches from China.

To return to the question about the fireworks, does it matter all that much?

Games organisers certainly didn’t think so. Games Executive Vice President Wang Wei said it was done to achieve a better effect. “It was a joint decision to achieve the most theatrical effects,” Wang said. “I do not think there is anything wrong with that.”

Is he right?

PHOTO: The Olympic rings seen during the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games at the National Stadium, August 8, 2008. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez

Organisers created a bit of a storm this morning when they revealed that parts of the spectacular firework display at the opening ceremony had been pre-recorded.

See this from Karolos Grohmann’s story on Reuters:

“Some footage had been produced before the opening ceremony to provide theatrical effect,” Beijing Games Executive Vice President Wang Wei told reporters.

Among the sections that were pre-produced were parts of a stunning fireworks display across the city, a series of fireworks “footprints” that led to the Bird’s Nest stadium where the four-hour extravaganza was staged.

A night-time aerial shot traced the consecutive explosions on the ground as they approached the stadium. “There were footprints of fireworks,” Wang said. “Some of them were genuinely produced. Some maybe were used from previously recorded material.”

This news clearly annoyed at least some people, judging by reaction around the Web, but does it really matter if organisers used a few tricks to ensure the TV viewing public would see a perfect show?

Wasn’t there also a suspicion that organisers of the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona had a trick up their sleeve to ensure the final lighting of the Olympic cauldron (with the archer, you’ll remember) passed off without a hitch?

In any case, the opening ceremony in Beijing wasn’t even shown live in the United States… 

Russell Boyce writes: Deciding on a picture of the day from the opening ceremony proved to be harder than I first thought.

The picture has to have the Olympic flame, it has to show the Olympic Rings, it has to show the stadium and part of the opening ceremoy itself and of course it has to show fireworks.

With this carefully shot and well composed picture, Beijing based photographer David Gray has captured as many elements as possible while still retaining shape and energy.

Russell Boyce is Reuters chief photographer, Asia. For a selection of other great Reuters pix from the Games click here. For the previous day’s chosen picture click here.

The opening ceremony for the Beijiing Olympics on Friday was a dramatic assertion of China’s power and nationalism.

But as if having the Olympic cauldron lit by a “flying” gymnast Li Ning, suspended by wires high above the heads of 91,000 spectators, wasn’t proof enough that even gravity could be conquered by the world’s most populous nation, the government defied the elements as well.

China “blew away” threatening rain clouds with a barrage of more 1,000 rain dispersal rockets, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Chinese meteorologists told the agency it was the largest rain dispersal operation in China, and the first time that such technology had been used to ensure the weather condition for Olympic opening.

Photo: This combination picture shows former gymnast Li Ning of China suspended in mid-air as he lights the Olympic cauldron during the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games at the National Stadium August 8, 2008. The stadium is also known as the Bird’s Nest. REUTERS/Jerry Lampen

To bring you the stunning choreography of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, Reuters photographers and photo editors do a complex dance of their own — and then a brutal Darwinian whittling down to select just the best and most iconic images to send to subscribers.The team shot a staggering 18,000 frames during the four hours of the ceremony. Only about 850 shots made it to the “wire” — our file of photos to customers. That’s just five percent. Less than a 10th of those were selected for our web slideshow and a typical newspaper subscriber might only print one two or three shots from the selection.

In a brutally competitive world like this, nothing can be left to chance.

One of our most experienced Olympic photographers and editors, Gary Hershorn, attended rehearsals of the opening ceremony in order to plot out key moments that simply had to be captured.

That advanced planning helped the team of 12 photographers in the stadium, nine immediately outside and six in Tiananmen Square and on the Great Wall get ready to tell the story in images through a mixture of bread-and-butter set-up shots and imaginative compositions that matched the dreamy romance of the show itself.

The 12 in the stadium had set positions from the roof catwalk down to the stage and scattered all around the Bird’s Nest. Four were directly cabled into the editors’ computer system (and, in fact, we had two senior editors, including the global head Tom Szlukovenyi, in the stadium itself to do on-the-scene selection of the key shots); the rest sent their computer disks to the editors via runners.The gargantuan task of editing the file was split between the editors in the venue, six editors and 15 processors in the main press centre and a further specialist desk in Paris that selected photographs of VIPs for magazine use.

This type of volume would have been absolutely impossible in the days before digital photography -18,000 prospective shots would have taken some 600 rolls of film, a physical and financial impossibility!

After the dramatic spectacle, the grind of chronicling 204 delegations began. Editors made sure we had shots of the delegation from every place we have clients as well as every place that was somehow newsworthy.

After just a couple of hours sleep, the team regrouped to start the work of capturing the actual sport.

Photo credits: (from top) Mike Blake/Reuters, Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters, David Gray/Reuters

I’ve been deafened by the drums, astounded by the aerial acrobatics and blinded by the cornea-carving light show. The torch is lit in its giant cauldron hanging from the lip of the Bird’s Nest stadium and the 2008 Olympic Games have begun.

But what is it I’ve sat through for hours on a steamy Beijing evening? Was it mass-participation theatre, a pseudo-religious sanctification of sport, a kitsch ‘son et lumiere’ mangling of traditional Chinese art forms? A pyrotechnics-fuelled rock ballet? A modernised courtly pageant or a magnified pantomime of over-produced gimcrackery? The best of Cirque du Soleil-style wizardry or high camp showbiz?

It was any of the above, depending on your taste. Artistically it was a crowd-pleasing mishmash, in the tradition of all such ceremonies. Oscar-nominated Chinese film director Zhang Yimou engaged creative overdrive to trowel significance into the joints of what he built, rampaging across the cultural landscape for his raw material.

The gala display left few cultural forms or genres of human expression untouched in its technically dazzling but historically selective sweep across China’s imperial past.

Multi-participant dance, strangely-headgeared quill formations, dancers cavorting to form calligraphy and actors in the shape of blocks of type swept across the stadium floor.

Peking Opera puppeteering, 8th century Tang dynasty poetry, scroll painting and ancient Kunqu song vied with synthesised ambient noise and Liberace-esque piano tinkling. Energetic Taiji exercises by white-costumed martial artists reached into China’s rich philosophical store cupboard and stomped out a lesson on ‘the unity of man and nature’.

What did it all mean?

Liu Qi, head of the Games’ organisation, said it was a showcase that would ‘provide a unique and unprecedented interpretation of the Olympic spirit and ideal from the Chinese perspective’. It would embody the aspiration of all 1.3 billion Chinese ‘for a harmonious world,’ he said, stating an ambition as resoundingly bland and empty as the official Games’ motto of ‘One World, One Dream.’

Generously, it was a wild, welcoming fiesta that should pluck the heartstrings of all humanity and kick off 16 days of spectacular sporting endeavour. More sceptically, it was a multi-layered lacquering over of China’s broken promises to improve its human rights record and respect press freedom. And few doubt the ceremony’s jaw-dropping ambition and no-holds-barred cost were partly tribute to China’s economic, social and geopolitical resurgence.

Where did Zhang go for his ideas? The former problem child for the Communist Party, whose early films were banned for showing China’s ugly side, now shines a more favourable light. His Wushu martial arts epic Hero and action romance House of Flying Daggers retain his early trademark of sumptuous colour, a feature of the show. Both films employ wire fu techniques of breathtaking air fighting. That might account for the ceremony’s trapeze scenes, including the spectacular roof run by ex-Olympic gold-winning gymnast Li Ning that lit the stadium flame.

And Zhang moonlights as an opera director, staging Puccini’s Turandot at the Forbidden City in central Beijing, with a cast of over a 1,000. The man has a taste for lavish spectacle. His collaborator, Zhang Jigang, China’s leading choreographer, best known for Thousand Hand Bodhisattva, is also a Lieutenant General in the People’s Liberation Army. No problem then for the Zhangs to mobilise reinforcements. There were 9,000 PLA members dancing, flying and tumbling tonight.

Reuters photos by Lucy Nicholson, Eric Gaillard and Reinhard Krause 

I hesitated before posting this as for a variety of reasons we had very little time and a very dodgy mic to record our first Reuters podcast from the Beijing Games.

Still, in the spirit of blogging (and full disclosure) I thought I’d give you a chance to hear our first stab it it. I’m joined by my fellow reporters Simon Evans, Ossian Shine and Julian Linden for a chat abut opening ceremonies, the first medal events and the Michael Phelps.

Please leave your comments and check back tomorrow for our thoughts on day two. Hopefully we’ll have improved a bit.

Auspicious, fortunate, lucky - the 08/08/08 date is supposed by Chinese to bring blessings.

In a gesture of ambitious synchronicity the Opening Ceremony was to have kicked off on that date at 8 minutes past 8pm.

But that proved a digit too far and the jollities are now to start on the hour, launching a 3-1/2 hour extravaganza of music, dance, acrobatics, flag-waving and pomp.

There are other numbers to tell the story of the ceremony, which have been proudly handed out in advance by the organisers. They capture the ambitious grandeur of China’s Olympic adventure, a no-expense-spared, attention-grabbing combination of self-confidence and ingratiation.

Since we are in the stats-rich environment of a sports event (yes the Olympics are also about sport!), here are my top 10 Opening Ceremony numbers.

1. 179,400 bottled drinks expected to be sold in the stadium. The media get their bottled water for free.
2. 15,153 different types of costume. That’s a big wardrobe.
3. 9,000 People’s Liberation Army performers on the stadium floor. China, the world’s most populous nation, has no problem marshalling manpower for big events.
4. 3,000 Scholar disciples of Confucius are to appear. That’s what the programme says. I don’t know yet what it means.
5. 800 kilogrammes weight of a paper scroll on the stadium floor. The Chinese traditions of calligraphy and scroll painting figure heavily in the ceremony.
6. 100 girls playing the pipa, a pear-shaped Chinese instrument.
7. 58 actors dancing on a model of the world.
8. 48 hours. The longest continuous practice session for performers. Surely not? That’s an ultra-marathon, not a rehearsal.
9. 4 inventions that China contributed to civilisation — the compass, gunpowder, paper and moveable type.
10. 1.7 metres, the required height for the evening’s martial arts performers.

And one statistic that was unlucky — the 16 performers who were injured while rehearsing a particularly complex part of the performance.

PHOTO: A man, with the logo of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on his face, is seen near the National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, August 8, 2008. REUTERS/Ceerwan Aziz

I’d like to write that when I first arrived in Beijing on that freezing February morning in 2006, I spied, through the gloom and smog, the number 900 on the Olympic countdown clock that sits beside the airport highway.

I can’t do that, sadly — I don’t remember it, and I’m not even sure the countdown clocks were up by then — but that is, by my calculation, what it would have read on my first day in China.

This morning I did see a clock and it read zero. In the intervening two-and-a-half years I have lived and breathed the Beijing Olympics and must have written today’s date, the eighth of the eighth 2008, hundreds of times.

I remember the 800 day countdown very well. I had gone to Jingsong No.4 School in central Beijing to write a story about the Olympic education programme.

Rather than the quick tour of a classroom and chat with a few children, however, I found myself seated on a platform alongside the local dignitaries and Olympic badminton silver medallist Dong Jiong as the whole school performed Olympic-themed activities in front of us.

As one of the “honoured guests”, I then had to walk across the stage and place a crepe ribbon on a big cardboard cut-out of the numbers 8-0-0.

The 700, 600, 500, and 400 countdowns must have been marked but I can’t remember how.

I do remember the fierce heat on Tiananmen Square when IOC president Jacques Rogge spoke at the ceremony to mark the one-year countdown for the Games last August.

I had interviewed the good doctor straight from the airport the day before and I think it was dawning on him just how serious the pollution problem was. Most of his previous visits to Beijing had been in the golden days of spring or autumn.

I was back on Tiananmen with 130 days to go to watch President Hu Jintao hand the Olympic torch to Liu Xiang before the high hurdler ran the first few steps of a journey that would take the flame around the world into protest and controversy.

With 114 days to go, I got back into the Bird’s Nest for the first time in two years to see the wonderful state of the art stadium that had replaced the dirt and rough concrete bowl I had seen in 2006.

Two weeks later, when the 100 day countdown was marked in Beijing, I was at Everest Base Camp in Tibet. I would have been gazing up at the world’s highest peak hoping the snow would clear so the torch bearers could get the Olympic flame to the top and we could all get out of the freezing cold and back to an altitude where human beings can function properly.

There have been many more events, including the hundreds of organising committee news conferences that have often tested my boredom threshold. Thankfully, the talking is over now.

Let the Games begin!

Nick Mulvenney is Reuters sports correspondent, China. Click here to see a video of Nick talking about the final countdown to the Beijing Olympics.

PHOTO: Members of Spain’s synchronised swimming team attend practice at the National Aquatics Centre, also known as the Water Cube, ahead of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 7, 2008. Picture taken with a fisheye lens underwater. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay