The Best Photos From Last Night’s Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympics

2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony hero

If you didn’t catch the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony – all 4 hours of it – in Beijing, I certainly hope you taped/tivo’d/recorded it. It’s impossible to do the sensory impacting performance justice.

The 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony Photos

2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony

There has never been an opening ceremony even close to this one in terms of production and sensory impact. The sights, sounds, colors, engineering, movement, enormous LCD screen, projection on the skrim that ran around the stadium’s top edge, performers in perfect synchronization, singers, dancers, aerialists, martial arts, painting, calligraphy, tradition, modern design and production was absolutely spectacular. The incredibly talented Eiko Ishioka was the art director for the event.

Below are the best photos I could find from Xinhua, Reuters, the AFP, the AP, the SF Chronicle, and Getty images.

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And of course, the spectacular lighting of the cauldron by Chinese gymnastics champion Li Ning during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics held in the National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, in north Beijing, China, Aug. 8, 2008: