The 29th summer Olympic Games opened at the National Stadium in Beijing with a ceremony directed by the filmmaker Zhang Yimou, involving thousands of performers and a four-hour programme tracing Chinese history.
The Games were the most expensive in Olympic history to that point, accompanied by new airport terminals, subway lines and stadiums. For the Chinese government they served as a statement of arrival after three decades of rapid growth.
The event also drew sustained international scrutiny of China's human rights record and of air quality in the capital, with the torch relay disrupted by protests in London, Paris and San Francisco earlier in the year.
