SHENZHEN Light Show made its debut during the National Day holiday and attracted 1.12 million viewers in the nine days up to Saturday, sources from Shenzhen Urban Administration said.

Every night, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the Shenzhen Civic Square and atop Lianhua Hill to watch the light show that illustrated Shenzhen’s development over the past decades with changing patterns made by 1.18 million sets of lights installed on 43 buildings in the Futian CBD.

On the night of Oct. 1, a record number of viewers were present to view the show with 218,000 in attendance. To ensure safety and maintain order, Futian police mobilized more than 1,000 officers every night. To ensure power supply, the urban administration dispatched 622 employees to inspect lighting facilities on 100 road sections.

The total cost for the light show and a related urban lighting landscape project in the CBD area was budgeted at 238 million yuan (US$34.49 million). The bidding price for the project was 189 million yuan. According to Chen Haiyan, the project manager, this investment is low compared to light-show projects in other cities in China. In terms of electricity use, the cost for each round of the show is 839 yuan.

Each round of the show dedicated to China’s 40 years of reform and opening up began at 7:30 p.m., 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. during the holiday, starting with a countdown and cheers of the crowds and then proceeding with a sequence of themes depicting Shenzhen as a city of the mountains and the sea, a window into reform, a city of innovation and a land of harmony.

Each part of the show has a specific color scheme and the color saturation is controlled to match, as close as possible, the color of a computer monitor.

The highlight of the show is when two kinds of light are combined to form a picture, marking the first time in the country that such a show has been presented.

The light show will run until the end of the year, at which time new schedules will be released.

(Han Ximin)