On 26 July 2008, an event named ‘origami stars, millions of hearts’ set a new Guinness World Record for the largest origami mosaic in Hong Kong, China. The event was organized by Hong Kong Youth Visual Art Association, Hong Kong Chinese Arts Festival, Lo Fung Art Gallery Ltd. and Hong Kong Union of Visual Artists Limited. The event started at nine ‘o’ clock in the morning in Hiu Kwong Street Sports Centre, Kwun Tong, Hong Kong ,China. Around 2,000 participants took turns to take part in the relay of making the mosaic which took 9 hours.
The participants were mainly students and teachers from Hong Kong, China, but some participants had come from other countries to be part of the record. They made origami stars and pasted them onto the paper on the floor to form a mosaic.
In order to make the event successful, the organisers had trained 150 volunteers, who trained the school children at making origami stars for two weeks prior to the event. Altogether there were over 100,000 origami stars used to form the mosaic. The mosaic was based on a picture drawn by a student in Hong Kong. It depicted Chinese people’s welcome to the coming Beijing 2008 Olympics and the best wishes for its success. The five pandas in five colors on the mosaic stood for goodwill ambassadors to show welcome to the foreign friends who will visit Beijing from all over the world.
Guinness World records adjudicator Angela Wu witnessed measured the size of the mosaic along with a professional surveyor from Hong Kong. The mosaic was 25.01 m (82.05 ft) long and 12.83 m (42.09 ft) wide, almost as big as a standard basketball court, the total area of the mosaic was 320.87 m² (3,453 ft²) beating the previous record of 231.8 m² (2,496 ft²). When Angela announced the new record, everyone present was very happy. The participants said that they were very glad that they could take part in the event and everyone was taking pictures as memories of this happy weekend.
