Asian countries will stage the first midnight parties to usher in 2000, with the festivities starting in the Pacific islands and spreading westwards. However, for the biggest and most populous country, China, the occasion has served to highlight internal tensions and misgivings about a Christian-based celebration which overshadows the Chinese New Year.
As a country with a richer and more glorious ancient history than most, China could have made the occasion a display of national pride, but the preparations have been half-hearted.
Only this week did President Jiang Zemin decide that he would light a flame in the millennium dome, which remains half finished.
What ceremonies there are will be stage-managed, and the most enthusiastic participants will be members of the foreign community. These include bonfires and (expensive) midnight banquets on the Great Wall, and a gathering of representatives of 56 ethnic groups and a mass dragon-dance on Mount Taishan, a symbol of grandeur to the Chinese.
The party on the Great Wall will start at 8 p.m. when a fax is received from New Zealand announcing the start of the millennium.
Chinese officials have argued however that the next millennium does not really start for another 12 months, and the Christian connotations of the celebrations have irked the leadership of the atheist state. The Communist Party has forbidden officials to use the popular phrase - qianxinian (the thousand happiness year) - to describe the millennium, though it is widely used to promote dozens of products in shops and by commentators on radio and television programmes.
The official Worker's Daily newspaper said: "As a Communist Party member, one should only believe in Marxism and dialectic materialism and not use terms like thousand happiness year with a religious connotation."
The official media also warned that "no one should participate in any celebrations to greet thousand happiness year which could affect stability and unity". This reveals the other reason for China's hesitancy to promote city-centre millennium celebrations.
It is afraid of popular protests, whether about job losses, corrupt officials, lack of democracy or the suppression of religious sects.
The crackdown on the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement especially has made Beijing a hostage to practitioners willing to sacrifice themselves in simple protest actions, such as performing Falun Gong exercises in Tiananmen Square, where large numbers of security police are permanently deployed these days to pounce and haul them away.
The only function advertised for the Tiananmen Square area, a late evening champagne and fireworks party in the Forbidden City, was cancelled yesterday by authorities who said they had arrested three people for fraudulently selling 500 yuan (£50) tickets to foreign students and diplomats.
With a remarkable lack of sensitivity, chunks of the recently renovated Tiananmen Square, where student pro-democracy protests were crushed in 1989, are being sent as millennium gifts by the Society of Chinese History to leaders of more than 170 countries, though what they are expected to do with the paving slabs, measuring 120 mm by 96 mm and 21 mm thick, it did not say.
Hong Kong, by contrast, will celebrate 2000 with a millennium extravaganza, a spectacle of sound and light at the Happy Valley Racecourse. The evening will begin with seven horse races, followed by a concert featuring prominent international and local artists. An estimated 400,000 people will pack streets around the main celebration venues at Happy Valley Racecourse, Times Square and Lan Kwai Fong and a further 500,000 in Kowloon.
In Japan, Land of the Rising Sun, many parties and festivals have been planned and people wishing to see the first rays of the sun in the year 2000 have gone to the Ogasawara Islands, 1,000 km south-east of Tokyo.
Out in the Pacific, four nations on the rim of the international dateline - New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga and the tiny island republic of Kiribati - are all competing for the right to claim that the first millennium sunrise.
Kiribati's Caroline Island is recognised by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and the US Naval Observatory as the first point of land where the sun will rise on January 1st. The rivals have cried "foul", however, because as recently as 1995, Kiribati redrew the international date line so that Caroline Island, now renamed Millennium Island, lies west of the arbitrary divide.
The dawn in Pitt Island, one of the Chatham islands, is expected to attract a global television audience of 850 million viewers. It has been reported however that locals are not over-excited about the event. Chatham islands' Mayor Pat Smith was quoted as saying that fewer than 300 people were likely to trek to the top of a hill overlooking nearby Pitt Island for the dawn ceremony. "A lot of people will be lying in their own beds watching their own island on TV," Mr Smith said.
Undeterred by Pitt Island's claims, Fiji is planning fireworks, concerts, festivals and sporting events for tourists. In New Zealand, celebrations centre on the eastern coastal town of Gisborne which will be the first sea-level spot to see the dawn of a new age, though many people in a spirit of fun are climbing nearby mountains where the sun will be visible a little earlier.