Gymnast lights Games torch in highwire stunt

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's "Prince of Gymnastics" Lin Ning launched the Beijing Olympics on Friday by lighting the cauldron in a daredevil highwire act that had the crowd in the Bird's Nest stadium gasping in astonishment.

The triple gold medalist, showing amazing courage and athleticism at the age of 44, was hoisted high above the 91,000 spectators, including more than 80 world leaders and royals.

They held their breath as he circled way over their heads like a runner racing round a track in slow motion. Then, hovering in mid-air, he lit the cauldron with a streak of flame.

The show-stopping feat wrapped up a breath-taking ceremony that began with a legion of 2,008 drummers pounding out a hypnotic beat that rumbled like thunder. Their red drumsticks glowed in a darkened Bird's Nest stadium.

In the land that invented gunpowder, fireworks exploded around the arena and erupted across the heart of Beijing.

Twenty-nine colossal "footprints of fire" shot into the sky and "marched" through the city to Tiananmen Square in a dazzling, rolling display of pyrotechnics. It was like a giant army of lights stamping across the heavens.

The vast cast -- wave upon wave of humanity -- chanted a famous Confucian greeting: "Friends have come from afar, how happy we are."

FLYING FAIRIES

Flying acrobats soared like fairies through the air and illuminated Olympic rings rose above the arena.

Traditional landscape paintings were projected on to a huge scroll and actors spelt out Chinese characters with their twisting bodies commemorating paper-making, one of China's great inventions.

Giant grey boxes representing printing blocks from Ancient China surged out of the ground, rippled across the arena and morphed into The Great Wall, one of the world's most instantly recognizable monuments.

Terracotta soldiers were portrayed returning in triumph in a traditional scene from Chinese opera. The "Silk Road" that linked China to the west was marked by an exotic tableau of blue-robed oarsmen with giant paddles. Its sheer scale was breath-taking.

One thousand dancers covered in sparkling lights weaved intricate patterns across the arena and transformed themselves into a fluorescent Bird's Nest as a little girl flew with her kite high above.

A 16-tonne crystal blue globe came out of nowhere and rose from the floor to gasps of astonishment from the crowd on a hot and humid night.

Actors who trained for 10 months were suspended high above the arena and ran rings round a gyrating globe, some of them upside down.

Britain's Sarah Brightman joined Chinese singer Liu Huan atop the globe to sing a specially composed Olympic anthem as pictures of children from all around the world were unfurled on parasols.

The show was delivered with cinematic panache and a cast of 14,000 by "House of Flying Daggers" movie director Zhang Yimou, whose work was once banned in China.

"This job is both glorious but arduous," he said after being entrusted with the task of showing the face of China to the world.

The extravaganza, cramming 5,000 years of history into just one evening, avoided many of the cliched images of China -- no pandas, no red lanterns and no dragon dances.

China was taking no astrological chances -- opening the Games at the auspicious moment of eight o'clock on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008. It paid dividends. The rain held off.

(Additional reporting by Catherine Bremer)

(Editing by Keith Weir and Ralph Gowling)