By Jin Yuhan

When the 20th Asian Games opened in Nagoya, Japan, on September 19, much of what a worldwide television audience saw at the opening ceremony, held at the Nagoya City Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium, had been engineered in eastern China.

Zhejiang Dafeng Industry Co., Ltd., a stage-technology and live-events company from Ningbo, was the Olympic Council of Asia's exclusive production partner for both the opening and closing ceremonies. Its brief covered the show end to end—creative planning, direction, digital content, the design and manufacture of the main cauldron, on-site staging, the cultural program and operations—earning it the label, in Chinese media coverage, of the ceremony's "chief architect".

Jiang Fan, head of brand and marketing at Dafeng, says the contract marks a long-sought shift for the company—from taking Chinese equipment abroad to taking Chinese creativity abroad.

At earlier international events, Chinese firms were mostly hired to supply hardware or a single service. In Nagoya, Dafeng exported the thinking as well: creative planning and technical standards went out with the equipment, putting Chinese design on a global broadcast alongside Chinese manufacturing.

No moment drew more attention than the lighting of the cauldron. The structure was built in Yuyao, shipped to Japan in August and installed in Nagoya on schedule.

Its designer, Yang Shaochang, design director at Dafeng, said the heart-shaped rim of the cauldron is inspired by the ceremony's "Imagine One Asia" slogan. Its clean lines, symmetry and metallic finish double as a nod to Nagoya's identity as a manufacturing city.

The flame itself is an optical effect. Dafeng's low-carbon "ignition" system uses water mist and programmable lights to mimic roaring flames without a drop of fuel—a setup the company says will cut more than 200 tons of carbon emissions during the Games.