Born in Tientsin, now known as Tianjin, not too many marathons from where the dramas of the XXIX Olympiad will be played out in Beijing, Eric Liddell became the first Chinese-born athlete to win Olympic gold when he won the 400 metres in Paris in 1924 for Britain.
It was to be another three-score years and 13 Summer Olympiads before China was to fully emerge from behind its great sporting wall and Xu Haifeng took the country's first gold medal in the 50-metre pistol shooting in Los Angeles in 1984.
But mere dates on a calendar and fractions of a second on a stopwatch belie the extraordinary life of a quite exceptional sportsman and an even more remarkable man.
Eric Henry Liddell, the second son of a Church of Scotland missionary, the Reverend James Dunlop Liddell, was born on January 16, 1902, in the north-eastern mainland city, but was sent for his education as a boarder at Eltham College near London, still some time and distance from Scotland, the country he was to represent with great distinction, not just in one sport but in two - athletics and rugby union.
It was 1920, when he went up to the University of Edinburgh to read for a Bachelor of Science degree in pure science that he first set foot on Scottish soil, but the laboratory was not to be Liddell's stage, his passion for religion and a natural ability in sport were to be his not-inconsiderable spheres of influence.
At university, it was at rugby union that he first excelled, representing Scotland seven times as a flying winger between 1921 and 1923, only once on the losing side.
But it was Liddell's remarkable pace that drew him to athletics.