Parade Order
Per tradition, the host country, in this case the People's Republic of China, marched last however contrary to tradition in the Olympic Games the national team of Greece did not enter first. All other nations marched in name order in the language of the host nation, which in this case is the Chinese language. As Chinese is written in characters and not letters, the order of the teams' entry was determined by the number of strokes in the first character of their respective countries' Simplified Chinese names. Countries with the same number of strokes in the first character are sorted by those of the next character. This made Guinea (几内亚) the first country to enter, as it takes two strokes to write the first character in the country's name (几), and Zambia (赞比亚) last-but-one, ahead of China.
Read more about this topic: 2008 Summer Paralympics National Flag Bearers
Famous quotes containing the words parade and/or order:
“Chaucer’s remarkably trustful and affectionate character appears in his familiar, yet innocent and reverent, manner of speaking of his God. He comes into his thought without any false reverence, and with no more parade than the zephyr to his ear.... There is less love and simple, practical trust in Shakespeare and Milton. How rarely in our English tongue do we find expressed any affection for God! Herbert almost alone expresses it, “Ah, my dear God!””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)