Mary Ma joined the queue for the final batch of tickets for the Olympic Games at 11.10pm last night, hoping to secure two seats for the diving events for her seven-year-old daughter.

The 40-year-old office administrator admitted that she was a little dismayed by what she found. Ahead of her, farther than the eye could see, stretched tens of thousands of people in the mother of all queues.

“If I don't get tickets my daughter will be devastated. Ever since she first heard about the Games she's been dying to watch them,” Mrs Ma said. In the few minutes she spent talking to The Times, another 60 or so people joined the queue behind her.

A mile or two ahead of her, at the very head of the queue, Xu Yong Heng, 25, lay under an umbrella trying in vain to sleep as an endless succession of photographers and television crews arrived to film him. Mr Xu, who works for a Beijing transport company, had reached the main Olympic ticket centre at noon on Wednesday. When the last 250,000 tickets go on sale at 9am today, he will have been queueing for 45 hours. “I'm doing it for the honour of attending the Olympics,” he said as he lay stretched out on the hard concrete with only the thinnest strip of foam for comfort.

The vast queue was testimony to the immense interest and national pride that the Games have generated across China, from the poorest peasant to the richest plutocrat.

In contrast to some previous Olympic Games, tickets for even the most obscure events have been snapped up in no time. Within an hour of the last batch of 1.38 million tickets going on sale in May the official website had 27 million hits, and it sold out in two days.

There are still two weeks to go until the opening ceremony but Beijing police have already detained 60 touts accused of selling tickets for up to 100 times their face value. One man attempted to sell four 50-yuan (£3.72) tickets to a basketball game between China and the United States for 5,000 yuan (£372) each.

For most ordinary Chinese, today's sale represents their last chance to witness what they regard as a truly momentous occasion for their country, and they made the most of it.

They came singly, in families and in groups, and stretched themselves out on the ground for a giant, good-humoured and characteristically orderly all-night party. They brought tents, awnings and bamboo mattresses, boxes of bottled water, buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and watermelons galore. They played cards and mahjong beneath the arc lights. Even the toilet queues were formidable.

“We're willing to queue this long because you only get this chance once in a lifetime,” said Jiang Sichao, 19, one of 20 students from Hubei province who had joined the line at 10am yesterday after a 14-hour, hard-seat train journey to Beijing.

The queue was overwhelmingly Chinese but about 12,000 people back sat Leo Obaya, a 21-year-old student from California who has been in Beijing for the past year. “There seem to be a million people in front of us, so I'm sure our chances are very low, but it's our last chance and we'd feel really bad if we went home empty-handed,” he said.

A Chinese businessman from San Francisco, who declined to be named, stood smugly aloof from the endless line but was confident of securing tickets. At 5pm on Wednesday, he said, he had paid two men 300 yuan (£22.30) each to queue for him.

Mass appeal

2 million pilgrims at the Vatican in 2005 for last rites of Pope John Paul II

5 million Hindus gathered for the Ardh Kumbh Mela festival last year

3 million Muslims converge on Mecca each year

Sources: Times Archive; agencies