BEIJING, Nov 13 — It’s 6pm on a Tuesday evening, and hundreds of media reporters are gathering in the five-star Beijing Parkview Wuzhou Hotel.

After a feast of more than 10 courses, with fried shrimp and grilled scallop, the journalists are about to be whisked away by bus to the Olympic aquatics sports center known as the Water Cube — the futuristic venue where US swimmer Michael Phelps won eight Olympic gold medals in 2008.

With the Water Cube lit up in shades of purple and pink, and crowds lining up beside neon banners in the freezing cold, this could almost be the setting for a rock concert.

Instead, the reporters are headed for the countdown to Singles’ Day.

Originally created as an anti-Valentine’s Day festival by Chinese college students, Nov.11 has been transformed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Over the course of the 24-hour shopathon, US$14.3 billion (RM62.692 billion) worth of sales will be made. But before the spending starts, Alibaba will entertain the nation’s 600 million Internet users with a Super Bowl-style gala, complete with an international list of celebrity guests and rumors that China’s President Xi Jinping is set to make an appearance.

Passing through two layers security checks, the reporters emerge into what looks like a NASA space control room — a massive hall with a Jumbotron-like display screen feeding live images from the gala in the adjacent arena. Security guards line up at every corner, doing sweeps to clear the building.

Once shopping starts, the screen will show a live stream of transaction figures, arcs on a 3D globe that look like missile launches charting the origin and destination of each purchase.

On the sidelines, staff are piling up Red Bull, coffee, cheesecakes and instant noodles — supplies to help keep 500 local and foreign journalists up past 1 a.m. for two consecutive nights, to witness and report on the live feed of transaction figures and the speeches by Alibaba’s executives.

Despite all this, there’s no heating system in the building. The Water Cube feels more like the Ice Cube.

The gala begins, and Alibaba has spared no expense bringing famous faces, including actors Daniel Craig and — by video link — Kevin Spacey, and American Idol finalist Adam Lambert — to spice up the evening. However the real star of the show is local pop idol group TFBoys: three teenagers with bowl-style haircuts, who dance to a cartoonish disco beat.

Even Tom Farley, the chief executive officer of the New York Stock Exchange, admits that TFBoys is the highlight as he stands beside Jack Ma, billionaire founder of Alibaba, for the bell-ringing ceremony near the gala’s end.

As reporters fight for camera spots and VIP rooms, back in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, tents and sleeping bags are lined up outside buildings. They’re there to help the e- commerce giant’s 34,000 staff make it through a shopping fest that overshadows Cyber Monday.

Just past midnight, the shopping begins.

Some 45 million people flood Alibaba’s website at the same time, with peak transactions reaching 85,900 per second.

Over the next 24 hours, sales outstrip the previous year’s total by 60 per cent and Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang says the company has sold so much milk and so many nuts that it would apply for eight Guinness World Records.

Of course, Xi never shows up. — Bloomberg