The opening and closing ceremonies of the 19th Hangzhou Asian Games, which will be held in China for the third time in its history, will be held on 23 October and will consist of programmes lasting no more than two hours .According to the Hangzhou Asian Games Organising Committee’s report to the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) in March this year, the Opening Ceremony at the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Centre Stadium in Hangzhou, China, at 9pm (CET) on 23 October will last 120 minutes (two hours), while the Closing Ceremony at the same venue on 8 October will be shorter at 80 minutes (one hour and 20 minutes).The highlight of the Opening Ceremony, the scheduled entry of the 45 participating nations, will last 40 minutes and will be followed by a 45-minute cultural performance after the official opening ceremony. The Hangzhou Asian Games organisers, who have vowed to go green by reducing their carbon footprint, have also broken with the tradition of ending the opening ceremony with a fireworks display and have promised to replace it with a colourful spectacle using new technology .The opening ceremony performances are expected to promote the 5,000-year-old Neolithic Liangzhu culture discovered in Hangzhou. The Games mascots, Chung Chung Lian Lian and Tian Tian embody Hangzhou’s world heritage sites and symbols. Chongchong represents the Liangzhu cultural relics, Lianlian represents the lotus petals of Hangzhou’s iconic West Lake, and Tiancheng is named after the bridge that spans the Grand Canal between Beijing and Hangzhou .The athletes’ entrance for the closing ceremony, where each country’s athletes will enter in a single file, is expected to take 28 minutes, the organisers said. The closing ceremony will conclude with the extinguishing of the flame that lit up Hangzhou for 17 days after the city handed over the Asian Games flag 스포츠토토존 to the 2026 hosts, Aichi Prefecture and Nagoya City, Japan.