[okazu]

Let’s Talk Olympics

August 10th, 2008 by Naomi

Everything and everyone in China is all about the Olympics, right now. I’ve never really cared about the sporting events themselves, and to be perfectly honest, I still don’t. I was, however, incredibly interested in watching the opening ceremonies. I spent those four hours sitting on my bed with a laptop and a bottle of red wine, watching things unfold live on Chinese television (commercial free!).

I don’t want to write a whole lot about this, because I don’t really desire to be yet another Olympics blogger (of which I am sure there are thousands, most of them complaining about the Chinese internet from their hotel wireless connections). However, here are a few relatively interesting facts:

Eight is a pretty darn important number in China. The opening ceremonies taking place on 08.08.2008@8:00p may seem sort of silly, but it was a big deal. The sound for eight 八 (”bā”) sounds like the sound of 发 (”fā”), the first character in the word 发财 (”fā cái”), which means to become wealthy. A lot of Chinese numbers have similar values placed upon them.

Some of the performances in the opening ceremonies depicted China’s four greatest contributions to the modern world (according to Chinese history and the British scholar Joseph Needham): gun powder, paper, the movable type printing press, and the compass.

The wikipedia article on this segment of the opening ceremonies mentions porcelain, but not the compass. Even as an Art History minor, I can’t say that I feel like porcelain production was as world-changing as the compass, though it was pretty darn important. I suppose it could be argued either way. More to the point, I don’t remember the performances all that well and I’m not up for any cross-referencing. I don’t remember porcelain at all, and the segment I thought could have been about navigation may have been about something else entirely. My Chinese isn’t good enough to have been able to tell. Regardless, the whole “artistic segment” was epic.

The participating nations (aside from Greece and China) entered the stadium according to number of strokes in the first character of the country’s simplified Chinese name. That may seem complicated, but it really makes perfect sense.

I think that other Olympics tidbits should be easy enough to find with some good searching skills, so I’ll leave you with some photos from Kunming. Okazu has to be good for something.