That Beijing organisers have chosen to mark 800 days to the start of the 2008 Olympics on Wednesday will come no surprise to those familiar with the power of numbers in China.

Auspicious numbers have long played a part in Chinese culture -- witness the 9,999 rooms of Beijing's Forbidden City -- and the right digits can still play a role in the choice of a home, telephone number or even a birthday.

Even numbers are luckier than odd. Two suggests harmony, six smooth progress. Four, a homonym for death, is unlucky, while nine, as highest single digit, stands for longevity.

Eight, though, is the luckiest of all.

"The pronunciation of the number eight is similar to the character 'faat' in Cantonese, which means prosperity, money and status," Professor Ding Xia of the Chinese Language and Culture Centre at Tsinghua University told Reuters on Tuesday.

"This opinion was mostly held by people in Guangdong province before, but after the reform and opening up about 20 years ago, it is popular all over the country with the movement of population becoming easier and faster."

It is surely no coincidence that the Games of the XXIX Olympiad will open at 8pm local time on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008.

The 1988 Olympics in Seoul were held in late September to avoid the scorching north Asian summer and the Beijing Games were originally going to open in the relative cool of late August.

While the official reason for the switch was so as not to clash with the

U.S. Open tennis and American baseball's pennant races, the auspicious numerology of August 8, 2008, will not have been lost on organisers.

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