Gallery: Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony

Let the games begin! The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics are officially open after a spectacular opening ceremony at the National Stadium – which is better known as the “Bird’s Nest”.

China’s capital city is the first to host both the summer and winter Olympics. The iconic Bird’s Nest stadium, which was built for the 2008 summer games, will also host the closing ceremony on 20 February.

The 24th winter games will see 3,000 athletes from 91 nations compete in 109 different events. Team GB, who had four-time Winter Olympians Dave Ryding and Eve Muirhead as flag bearers, have a squad of 50 athletes in China.

The opening ceremony was “a spectacle of music, choreography and technology”, said The Guardian. Fourteen years after overseeing both ceremonies at Beijing 2008, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Zhang Yimou was back as director.

Beijing 2022’s Olympic cauldron was lit after seven torchbearers carried six torches in the final torch relay inside the Bird's Nest, CNN said. “All the torchbearers are Chinese winter sport athletes born in sequential decades – the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the last two torchbearers from the 2000s.”

The Olympic torch was “placed into the centre of a giant snowflake, which was then illuminated to become the cauldron”, the BBC said. The snowflake was made up of placards with the names of the 91 nations competing at Beijing 2022.