BEIJING, Feb 28 (AP) -- Now that the winter Olympians have stolen away from Italy with their skis, skates and polished granite curling stones, the eyes of the sports world turn with rising excitement to the 2008 summer games in Beijing.

The excitement has been stirred by an irony of history. It follows the Athens games, site of both the ancient and modern Olympics, and comes for the first time to a vast and fast-growing Asian nation which got seriously involved in Olympic sports less than 25 years ago.

After the less than thrilling winter Olympics staged in a country familiar to millions of Americans, the Beijing games promise all the elements of an international thriller: mystery, money, controversy and pageantry. It will offer to the West a glimpse, through press and television, into a little-known country whose old civilization is colored by two very different philosophers, Confucius and Karl Marx.

Although it is regarded as one of the cradles of human civilization, its interest in organized sports during its Confucian era, which lasted until 1949, was minimal. Sports were the individual diversions of a highly born few.

When the Olympic games were renewed in 1896, the empress dowager Tzu Hsi is said to have asked what they were all about. Told they involved running, she reportedly remarked she could send some of her eunuchs to take part since they were experts at running her court.

True or false, in any event she was much too busy egging on a murderous nationalist group of highly unsporting fanatics called the Boxers, who believed magic charms made them unkillable and unbeatable.

They laid siege in 1900 to the foreign legations of Beijing. Their defeat by an allied army of Americans, Japanese and Europeans paved the way for the 1911 fall of imperial rule and the beginning of the republican era.

Sports for the masses did not flourish in that period except for the foreign conquerors who settled down in the defeated country to squeeze what wealth they could find out of it. They built polo grounds, race tracks, tennis courts and swimming pools for their own diversion and put up signs saying "Chinese keep out."

I met one of these Chinese in 1947, a highly educated mandarin whose long fingernails and courtly manner proclaimed disdain for work or sport. After lunch at the highly colonial Peking club, I took him to watch two sweating Brits playing a vigorous game of tennis under the hot sun.

"What," I asked, "do you think of this game?"

He smiled apologetically and replied, "It is much too much for me. I would hire coolies to do that kind of work."

Mao Zedong's communists whom I met in a seven-month stay in Yanan, their cave capital, had a very different view of sports. They actively encouraged widespread athletic activity not only for its own sake but for its value in war and nation-building.

When they conquered China in 1949 they still believed in its virtues but had to put off its application as they fought among themselves, bringing the nation to the brink of destruction.

Mao, the center of these quarrels, was a sports lover himself, famous for his widely reported plunges into the Yangtze river in the 1950s where it was said, but not confirmed, that he broke the world's record for floating downstream on his back.

Mao's death in 1976 marked the end of nationwide bloodshed and the rise of the diminutive Deng Xiaoping, whose only passion was bridge. A man of great wit and modesty, he let others have the titles but ran the show. He opened up China to the outside world, introduced the free market and allowed limited democracy and controlled capitalism.

During the 1980s and 1990s, when Deng shook up China, mass sports had their golden age. The women's volleyball team made the breakthrough in 1981: It defeated Japan for the first time to win a world championship, then after grabbing five consecutive world titles won an Olympic gold.

Before that, during the nationalist republican era, China competed in three Olympic games but never won a medal. Since Deng's day, it has won hundreds. In the 2004 Athens Olympics it took 23 golds, only three behind the leader, the United States.

Bitterly disappointed to lose its bid for the 2000 games, the Chinese government publicly and stridently declared they were "a human right of the Chinese people."

It was an unfortunate phrase, one that recalled recent failures, despite remarkable progress since 1949, to grant freedom to protest by some of its citizens.

Human Rights Watch, which monitors denial of freedoms worldwide, has already given notice it will pay special attention to the 2008 Games.

China's present rulers have yet to fully carry out Deng's plan to grant wider political and personal freedoms to match the enormous economic breakthrough which put China on its present path to unparalleled economic prosperity.

An object of astonished admiration for achieving 8 percent to 10 percent annual growth, China sees the Beijing games as a boost to that process. Hundreds of stores have already begun to stock their shelves with Olympic-related products. It similarly expects enormous returns in Olympic-inspired tourism, travel and trade.

But more than anything else, it yearns to collect what no money can buy: the goodwill and esteem of its neighbors and the prestige it enjoyed in ancient days as the illustrious Middle Kingdom.