Haixinsha Asian Games Park

This guide to Haixinsha Asian Games Park in Guangzhou tells how planners staged the 2010 Asian Games' opening ceremony on this river island with no stadium at all, solving a problem no host city had faced: seating 30,000 spectators and hiding 6,000 performers on ground that floods. You'll hear how giant screens sank into the stage floor, the center flooded into a lake on command, and a nearly 30-meter wooden ship rolled into view on hidden tracks. Stand on today's quiet lawns and imagine the machinery once buried beneath them.