THE first missiles began falling from the stands just as the home team, Beijing Guoan, were coming on to the pitch for their league match against Shanghai Shenhua last weekend. Some of them dropped on our seats in row 13 of section 6 in the Workers' Stadium. Others floated past us on to the running track.
They were all paper aeroplanes - of the kind schoolboys make - except that Beijing soccer fans specialise in making the most exquisite paper aeroplanes you can imagine.
The heavier ones, shaped from the glossy pages of the Marlboro programmes and Ford advertising brochures given to every fan going in, tended to stall dramatically after a short flight and then dive bomb the linesmen. Those fashioned from the lighter pages of the People's Daily glide gracefully for hundreds of feet through the still air, drawing appreciative cheers, or streak by soundlessly like cruise missiles.
Being hit by a paper plane is about as violent as it gets at a Chinese soccer game, though the decibel level of horns, klaxons and screaming human voices is as high as the human ear can bear.
Since big league soccer came to the country two years ago, the Sunday afternoon matches played by the 28 club teams in the A and B leagues have attracted huge, family oriented, crowds. Those around us waving the green colour of the Beijing team included children on their fathers' shoulders, businessmen with wives and mobile phones, women office workers, and youths with green bands around their foreheads.
Soccer hooliganism is practically unknown here, though intense regional rivalries have become a new phenomenon in China since the leagues were introduced in 1994 - and the Shanghai players were roundly booed most times they got possession.
The game I attended in the 70,000 seat stadium was the last of the 1995-96 league season, but for the pride of the Chinese capital it was really a warm up for today, the most important date in the local soccer calendar, when Beijing take on Jinan in the FA Cup final.
Chinese football took off as the world's fastest growing professional sport in 1993, when the Chinese Football Association - in the best communist tradition - laid down a 10 year plan, which - in the best capitalist tradition - allowed big money and know how to drive the game for the first time.
The International Management Group, whose clients include mega sports stars, Michael Johnson and Andre Agassi, was contracted to look after commercial and television rights, and corporate sponsors were invited in, including the big tobacco firm Philip Morris and Korean conglomerates Samsung and Hyundai.
Today, the Marlboro A League in China is probably the most popular football league anywhere in the world, with a fan base larger than the combined populations of Europe and the US.
Since its inception China has gone football crazy. Some 30 publications have appeared devoted to soccer. Football World sells 300,000 copies every fortnight. On Sunday evening from April to October 2 million people watch the match of the day on television, and the potential audience for a big game like today's is a staggering billion people.
Supporters charter planes for important away matches, something they never did before.
Earlier this year, former Beijing team captain, Wang Zhongxin (36), opened the Old Players Restaurant downtown where fans now crowd in under a ceiling hung with miniature soccer balls to watch league games. A Beijing Guoan sports store in the Xidan shopping district sells green team uniforms, which teenagers proudly wear to school. Beijingers love their team for, as one fan put it, playing from the heart and giving all they have got in every game.
Professional soccer in China actually dates back to the 1950s, when a national team trained in Hungary, but it lapsed during the Cultural Revolution and in the 1970s they had to start all over again.
Internationally they never did well. National frustration with the poor performance of the Chinese squad boiled over for Beijing only soccer riot in 1986, when fans vandalised the Workers' Stadium to protest about being put out of the World Cup by Hong Kong.
Until three years ago all players received the same low salaries. Now first class footballers can earn the equivalent of £2,500 a month, an astronomical salary to most Chinese, and transfer prices have shot up to the £50,000 level.
With a shorter working week and more money in their pockets, up to 35,000 fans, paying prices equivalent to a week's wage, have been turning up faithfully to cheer on Beijing Guoan. An added attraction are the two Portuguese players, brought in under a new rule allowing a couple of foreign players to each league team.
Beijing Guoan (Guoan is the name of a company), now invites the top world squads to play challenge games. Maradona came with his Boca Juniors in July and earlier this year AC Milan paid a visit and were held to a draw before an ecstatic Workers' Stadium crowd.
China now has its eye on the next World Cup. The Yugoslav coach who coaxed the lowly Cameroons into the final stages of the 1990 World Cup has been hired to train a team of young Chinese professionals. Italy and Brazil - look out!
Beijing Guoan incidentally won the game last week, scoring the only goal, an event of no consequence in the league table, which was topped by Dalian from Liaoning province, but which produced such a cacophony of sound it frightened the life out of a few racing pigeons which had the misfortune to be passing overhead, and unleashed waves of paper aeroplanes to loop and dive all over the stands.