China: Fintan O'Toole went to Beijing's Temple of the Sun to watch fans revel in the World Cup final
A century ago, the huge white stone altar in the Temple of the Sun in Beijing was still the place where the emperor offered annual sacrifice to one of the elemental forces of life. At two o'clock yesterday morning, worshippers gathered again to adore another of those elemental forces.
Coming in through the ceremonial entrance to the great circular enclosure, they faced the grand dais and bowed their heads towards the two 20-foot high screens on which the solemn rites would be enacted.
Raising to their lips the sacred libations of Tsingtao beer, they sat under big beach umbrellas with their feet ankle-deep in rainwater and waited for the World Cup final to kick off.
The gods showed their displeasure at the defilement of their altar by sending an apocalyptic lightening storm to lash the apostates. An hour before kick-off, the skies opened and torrents of rain tumbled out, attended by furious thunder-claps and flashes of fork lightening that turned the night to day. Most of the Beijingers who were committed to the all-night vigil heeded the warnings and either stayed at home or crowded in to the teeming bars of Sanlitun and the Lotus Market.
But there were still a few hundred zealots insane enough to huddle beneath their umbrellas in the open air and scream their heads off at Zidane and Cannavaro.
All month, Chinese people had been doing these crazy things. Given that the Chinese team never came close to qualification for the finals, it might be expected that interest in the festivities in Germany would be muted.
Instead, the lack of direct involvement made the enthusiasm all the purer and all the less restrained.
The World Cup was an excuse for an enthusiasm that came with no strings attached, and hundreds of millions of Chinese people revelled in it.
Before the games began, the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao told a press conference that the games would be played in the middle of the night, Chinese time, and that many people would be bleary-eyed because they would stay up to watch them. It seemed like a stern complaint until he added "and I am one of them".
His predictions were accurate. In a part of the world where dawn breaks early and it is normal to be up by six o'clock, sleep was sacrificed to soccer. The live Chinese audience of 63 million people for the dull and relatively unimportant first-round game between England and Paraguay was larger than the entire populations of England and Paraguay.
In a supposedly xenophobic country, many people attached themselves to foreign teams with obsessive passion. The CCTV match commentator Huang Jianxiang got into trouble because his reaction to Italy's last-gasp winner over Australia was not exactly a model of professional neutrality: "Goooooal! Game over! Italy win! Beat the Australians! . . . Italy the great! . . . Happy birthday to Maldini! Forza Italia! . . . (Australia) should go home. Farewell!"
Huang made a public apology, but his outburst was so popular that one enterprising website made a small fortune from selling a recording of it as a mobile phone ring-tone.
In Nanjing, after Brazil lost their quarter-final match against France, one grief-stricken elderly man ran amok in a city square and started hitting people with a stick, screaming: "The Brazilians lost! I don't want to watch any more games!"
Another pensioner in the same city had earlier been arrested for running around the streets naked carrying a banner reading "Brazil Must Win!" Less hysterically, the monks in the remote Rumtek monastery in Tibet announced before the final that they were praying for Italy.
To those prayers seemed to be added the entreaties of most of the Chinese fans at the Temple of the Sun.
Good humoured and inclined to cheer any moment of skill from either side, their emotions were gradually swayed by the small but heroic clump of Italian ex-pats who, unlike their French counterparts, had braved the storm to cheer their side.
As dawn broke during the second half of injury time, the rain stopped and the clearing skies illuminated the bedraggled Azzurri, still dancing in the flood, still sure of victory. As the penalties were slotted home and the Italians roared in ecstasy, a young Chinese man in a football shirt the colour of the sun raised a home-made model of the World Cup trophy to the brightening sky, saluting the new emperors.