When Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympics, it fielded 2,000 musicians for the opening ceremony. Beijing yesterday upped the ante by eight, and that was before the official ceremony started.
A total of 2,008 musicians created a field of drums on the floor of the National Stadium last night, beating out a thunderous countdown to the exact moment for the start of the Games, accompanied by a roar of approval from the crowd.
The musicians used identical, table-sized Chinese drums called fou - a clay vessel with a skin stretched over the top. But the drums had a modern twist: they lit up in the dark, and percussionists used red luminous sticks to play.
At the Athens Games in 2004, two drummers - one in the Olympic stadium and the other projected on a screen from ancient Olympia - launched the opening ceremony.
The sheer number of drummers reflected the penchant of director Zhang Yimou for mass performances, seen throughout the opening ceremony. It also recalled a scene in the 1984 movie Yellow Earth, for which Zhang served as cinematographer, of drummers performing in unison on a dusty plain.
Traditional instruments made appearances throughout the opening bash. A musician plucked a stringed instrument called a guqin, a type of zither, at the beginning of the artistic programme.