On July 13 2001, the world was afforded the rare and spontaneous sight of a Chinese president pumping hands amid a throng of delirious revellers in Tiananmen Square. Jiang Zemin was celebrating the award of the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing, a moment that, according to the official Xinhua news agency, marked “another milestone in China's rising international status and a historical event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation”.

Seven years on and Beijing is ready to put on a Games that many observers believe will be unsurpassed for decades to come – in the scale of ceremony, sweep of architectural wonder, and cost.

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, says each Olympic Games provides added value: Sydney in 2000 gave the world Australia's appreciation of sport; Athens four years ago brought the Olympics back to its roots; London four years hence will bring it to the country where modern sport was invented.

And Beijing? “Beijing's added value will be in providing the biggest Games,” Rogge says.

Every host city works itself into a frenzy of excitement and anticipation as it reaches the culmination of up to 10 years of planning – about three years in preparing a bid and seven years of design, construction and organisation of the Games. None more so than Beijing, even though the earthquake that struck Sichuan province in May appears to have taken a lot of the shine off the build-up.

Losing out in 1993 to Sydney in the contest to host the 2000 Olympics, after Beijing mounted a determined and confident bid campaign, was a blow to national pride. China's ruling elite had viewed the Olympics as a pathway back on to the international stage after years of isolation following the Tiananmen Square crackdown of the student-led democracy movement in 1989.

Anxious not to suffer the indignity of another bidding failure, China's leaders waited for a more opportune moment. “They were afraid of losing a second time,” recalls Denis Oswald, an executive board member of the IOC. “They did not want to lose face.”

By the time IOC members gathered in Moscow on that July day in 2001, they believed Beijing's case had improved markedly from eight years previously. The technical aspects of the bid were better, and while western criticism about human rights and freedom of speech in China remained powerful, IOC members persuaded themselves a vote for Beijing would act as a catalyst for change. The city won by a comfortable majority of IOC members.

“The country had opened up much more,” Oswald says. “More people were speaking foreign languages, and the economic revolution was such that they were much better prepared for getting the Games.”

Above all, he adds, giving the Games to China would widen the reach of the Olympic movement. “China is such an important country, one-fifth of the world's population,” he says. “China had participated successfully in recent Olympics and so we felt they deserved a chance. We also felt it would boost their evolution towards a more open relationship with the rest of the world. By hosting the Olympics, the world would come to them and they would have the chance to welcome the world.”

The Chinese government has devoted huge resources to building the facilities to host the Olympics. The cost of the these facilities is likely to end up well in excess of $20bn. The 302 events across 28 sports will take place in 37 venues, 12 of them new, the centrepiece being the architecturally stunning 80,000-seater Olympic stadium, nicknamed the “Bird's Nest”.