It is no clich - for my part, I truly am most grateful to be chosen as spokesman for the Beijing Olympic Torch Relay and be on this historic relay journey.

Each of the 21 relay cities is home to fascinating and distinctive cultures, peoples and stories, and I confess to carrying the occasional selfish thought of "Hey, why don't we stay here a little longer "

St. Petersburg in Russia is one of those cities. It's massive - too massive, really, to be missed, especially for Chinese, and especially for Chinese for my generation.

For some, the names "Russia" and "St. Petersburg" - or "Leningrad" as it was known in my youth - embody romance. For others, their meaning may range anywhere from wartime heroism to center of Russian art and literature.

But the overall sentiment is the more or less the same - a sense of warmth.

Youngsters in China these days might not understand emotions of people my age toward Russian literary works, which never were a love-at-first-sight affair.

Instead, the feelings were a result of a gradual buildup. Kids learned few of the many beautiful Russian songs in kindergarten, and became familiar with the touching tales - and music such as Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony - during the Siege of Leningrad in elementary school.

And when we were old enough to read books, in came Nikolai Ostrovsky's How Steel is Tempered. With it accompanied the more romantic popular songs such as the Night at the Harbor (which was written in St. Petersburg) and Lamplight - as I wrote earlier, the list goes on forever, although I'm ashamed of not being familiar with any of the original names in Russian. Poetry and novels were for grown-ups, but as a teen, I often dreamed (who didn't) of writing giant epics to dwarf War and Peace or Crime and Punishment.

Gone with that thought now; to actually be here is dreamlike enough.

It's where War and Peace opened, where Dostoevsky spent his best days, where Pushkin wrote, and where Tchaikovsky went to school, debuted, lived and was buried! The names alone are sufficient to produce a shivering effect of excitement.

It's as if a hundred Santa Clauses came at once.

Personal recollections and jokes aside, what amazes me most here is the fact that St. Petersburg today is home to not a hundred smiling Santas, but more than 80 Olympic champions.

That means that if it wanted to, it could have an Olympic champion running each of the 80 relay legs allowed per city. It is the only city in the world, outside the Chinese mainland, that could do so.

Perhaps the picturesque canals, islands on the quiet Neva River, white nights and cultural traditions here also gave inspiration to the city's sports stars.

Qu Yingpu, deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily, is spokesman for the Beijing Olympic Torch Relay

(China Daily 04/05/2008 page3)