The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics will get the Summer Games - billed as the greatest show on earth - off to an explosive start on Friday.You should not expect anything less from the nation that invented gunpowder, and fireworks are certain to play a major role in the 3-½ hour spectacular that China hopes will help dispel the political controversies dogging their Olympics.Beijing's new national stadium, the steel-latticed 'Bird's Nest', hosts the lavish opening ceremony which will draw on some 10,000 performers and could net a global television audience of more than four billion people.It will also be the most expensive in Olympic history, with media speculating that as much as $100 million has been earmarked for the opening and closing ceremonies - more than twice that spent on the acclaimed 2004 Athens pageant.The world got a tantalizing glimpse of what is in store when a South Korean television crew slipped past the security cordon last week to film a secret dress rehearsal.Their footage, flashed over the internet, showed aerial artists floating over the track, kung-fu formations and humpbacked whales cavorting around the rim of the Bird's Nest."The ceremony will be astonishing and magnificent," said Frenchman Yves Pepin, a multimedia events expert who has helped Zhang devise the show and has signed a confidentiality clause preventing him from revealing any content."This will be a way for China to show the world what it is capable of," he told Reuters. "I think it is going to be the biggest show of its type ever seen."The Games signal China's ascent from poverty and isolation to a place at the summit of the global community. It now has the world's fourth-largest economy.But like much of the Olympics, the ceremony has been enmeshed in politics, with Hollywood director Steven Spielberg quitting as an adviser earlier this year to protest at China's close ties with Sudan.Then world leaders got into the act, debating whether to skip the ceremony to protest over China's human rights record.In the event, US President George W. Bush announced he would attend, as well as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel declined to come.Condensed HistoryZhang and his army of workers hope that for 210 minutes the world will just focus on the fun. "The ceremony won't make people forget all the controversies, but they might put them aside for just 3-½ hours," said Pepin, who masterminded the opening of the 1998 soccer World Cup in France.Zhang, who directed films such as Raise the Red Lantern and House of Flying Daggers, has spent three years working on the production, looking to condense 5,000 years of Chinese history into a 50-minute segment which will be slotted into the show."Some previous ceremonies have been truly extraordinary and I have no doubt that the Chinese will match that, at least, if not take it on to another plane," said British events producer Harvey Goldsmith, who organised the 2005 Live 8 concerts."But frankly these things go on for too long and it is getting increasingly hard to wow people," he added.All the hard work and money could yet be wasted if one of Beijing's notorious summer storms hits when the curtain goes up - especially since original plans to put a roof on the stadium were abandoned in an effort to curb costs.Leaving nothing to chance, the gala will kick off at 8 minutes past 8.00 p.m. on the 8th month of 2008. Eight is a lucky number in China and in a year marked by the deadly earthquake in Sichuan province a bit of luck would be welcome.
