Chinese President Xi declares 19th Asian Games open in Hangzhou (updated)

HANGZHOU, Sept. 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping declared the 19th Asian Games open on Saturday night at the lotus-shaped Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center Stadium in the capital of east China's Zhejiang Province.

The Games' opening ceremony reached its climax with an unprecedented digital cauldron-lighting ceremony, wherein millions of torchbearers transformed the digital flames into a digital human figure on the Qiantang River before it ignited the cauldron together with swimming Olympic champion Wang Shun, the last of six athletes who relayed the actual flame inside the stadium.