2008 Summer Paralympics opening ceremony

The 2008 Summer Paralympics opening ceremony was held at the Beijing National Stadium on September 6, 2008 just two weeks after the end of the 2008 Summer Olympics. The event was themed "One World, One Dream" and "Transcendence, Integration, Equality." The show was attended by about 91,000 to 100,000 spectators. It was approximately 3-hours in length and consisted of 6,000 performers and 4,000 disabled athletes from 148 countries.

The site of pre-ceremony performance is the Small Stage to the north of the field. After Pre-ceremony performance, the hosts give interactive guidance to the audience for 40 minutes. The pre-ceremony performance included a series of musical performances.

President of the People's Republic of China Hu Jintao makes an entrance along with Philip Craven, president of the International Paralympic Committee. Countdown started from "23", indicating the 23rd Summer Paralympic. From "23" to "1", highlights of this Paralympic Games were shown with countdown numbers on the screen. Both Arabic numerals appeared on the screen with typical patterns of minority ethnic groups as the background letter as "23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1" to the Games and herald the start of the officially opening time at 20:00:00 China Standard Time. The flag of the PRC is raised while the military band of the Chinese People's Liberation Army play the national anthem March of the Volunteers. More fireworks are displayed. Cartoon marathon athletes wear suits of different colors to form a line of rainbow. The rainbow stripe stretches around the stadium. They form the symbol of the Paralympic Games.

As with the 2008 Summer Olympics, the ceremony included a parade of nations, with a flag bearer for each national team. . As Chinese is written in characters and not letters, the order of the teams' entry was determined by the number of strokes in the first character of their respective countries' Simplified Chinese names. In this list the host country came last Countries with the same number of strokes in the first character are sorted by those of the next character. This made Guinea (几内亚) the first country to enter as it takes two strokes to write the first character in the country's name (几). A total of 148 nations enter in the predetermined order. With the Paralympic Games, athletes enter the stadium first and then watch the performances together with the audience. A huge feather consisting of 148 feathers is formed within the Bird's Nest, with each feather symbolizing the ideal of all people with disability in the world.

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