Beijing Olympics: Writing China on the World Scroll

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was dominated by the notion of a permanent inscription, writing history and otherwise leaving one's imprint. The logo for the Beijing Olympics was an ancient seal in which a swaying athlete is carved. The opening ceremony took a cue from this pithy condensation of calligraphic tradition. Oratory has never been as vital as an index of statesmanship as it has in the West. Instead Communist leaders garnered moral authority from their prowess as scribes and Chinese emperors were revered for their cultivated hand in a country whose administrators rose up the hierarchy through passing exams in calligraphy. Elegance with the brush has been long prized in China as a mark of wisdom, restraint and aura.

The ceremony kicked off with a paean to Chinese language and the glory of its ideographic script. The drummers at the beginning produced light through their pounding with both Arabic and Chinese numerals counted down. Then thousands of drilled performers demonstrated the sacred power of the written word and its fiat in China. When celebrating the invention of the printing press, each undulating human tablet stood for the place of each character. Then black clad acrobats represented human brushes inscribed paintings in a real time experimental calligraphy. The Chinese character for harmony morphed through various iterations into its modern version. Young children wielded enormous brushes in the modern section of the ceremony.

The Beijing Olympic Committee also determined that all participant national squads should enter the stadium not in the order of the Greek alphabet but in an order determined by the country name's stroke order in Chinese script. The scroll motif unfolded in the centre of the arena and later unfurled on the upper perimeter, the cornicing of the stadium, where it ended in a wraparound cone of the Olympic torch. The scroll motif mirrored the rococo cloud tessellations that covered the Olympic torch and other paraphernalia. Even the rostrum for keynote speakers was a gracefully folded sheet of metal which when seen in profile was a single scroll. The use of the scroll as screen upon which to project images was the most symbolic choice of all. As the gymnast holding the Olympic torch blazed a trail around the Bird's Nest the message was clear: this Olympics is a giant inscription in history and this opening ceremony will be etched on collective memory as the greatest ever.