LONDON () - Cramming several grand years of cultural history into a couple of hours is the truly Olympian challenge faced by Zhang Yimou on Friday.
Zhang, known in the West for his Oscar-nominated movie "House of Flying Daggers", is director of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony which offers China the chance to show hundreds of millions of television tV audience what it has apt the world.
"It is do with national pride -- it does become the first atomic number 79 medal of the Games," Olympic historian Philip Barker told .
"For every Games, in that respect is that sense that we ar presenting the nation to the mankind and that really has been plausibly since 1980 when the Games started to go a handsome television allot."
South Korea, the last Asian country to stage the Summer Games, used the Seoul Olympics to further its new status as an industrial powerhouse and the opening ceremony highlighted the isolation of its neighbor and rival, North Korea.
Greece used the widely acclaimed ceremony in Athens in 2004 to spell out its brobdingnagian contribution to Western civilisation and implicitly face down critics world Health Organization said it was to a fault disorganized to stage an event like the Olympics.
The ceremonial has besides been used as a platform for overt political statements even though the Olympic Charter bans "any kind of demonstration or political, spiritual or racial propaganda ... in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas".
At the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany, swastika-emblazoned banners obscured the Olympic flag.�
More info
