Fu Ying

By Fu Ying, Chinese Ambassador to Britain

In the morning of April 6th, looking at the snow flakes falling outside the window, I could not but wonder: what the torch relay would be like?

About 8 hours later, when the torch finally struggled through the route, Olympic gold medalist Dame Kelly Holmes ran up to light the Olympic cauldron at O2 Dome, 4,000 spectators cheered.

This day will be remembered as Beijing met London with splashes and sparkles. It was an encounter between China, the first developing country to host the Olympics, and Britain, the first western country to greet the torch.

On the bus to the airport, I was with some young girls from the Beijing team, including an Olympic Gold Medalist Miss Qiao. They were convinced that the people here were against them. One girl remarked she couldn't believe this land nourished Shakespeare and Dickens.

I can't blame them. I fully understood how they felt. They were running between vehicles for the whole day, nose red and hands cold, trying to service the torch bearers. They had only about three hours of sleep the previous night and some were having lunch sandwiches just now. Worse still, they had to endure repeated violent attacks on the torch throughout the relay. I was fortunate to sit at the rear bus and saw smiling faces of Londoners who came out in the tens of thousands, old people waving and young performers dancing, braving the cold weather.

In the darkness of London night, waving the chartered plane good-bye, I had a feeling the plane was heavier than when it landed. The torch will carry on and the journey will educate the over a billion Chinese people about the world and the world about China.