Sydney and Hong Kong put on stunning fireworks displays in a spectacular welcome to the New Year, among the first in a wave of celebrations for billions around the world. Australia's largest city organised its biggest-ever fireworks display, using a record amount of pyrotechnics as well as new effects. Colours lit up the city's skyline for 12 minutes and dazzled the more than 1.5 million spectators who packed the harbour front and parks.

To mark the international year of indigenous languages in 2019, the harbour also hosted a ceremony celebrating Aboriginal heritage that included animations projected onto the bridge's pylons.

In Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands of revellers packed the streets on both sides of the city's Victoria Harbour for a spectacular 10-minute firework show. Some $1.8 million worth of pyrotechnics bathed the city's skyscrapers in a dizzying array of colours

accompanied by a score that included Auld Lang Syne sung in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Revellers were packed shoulder to shoulder on the densely crowded streets, many festooned with LED lights and sparkly glasses reading "2019".
In the Indonesian capital Jakarta, more than 500 couples tied the knot in a free mass wedding organised by the government, with fireworks shows cancelled out of respect for tsunami victims.
New Year's Eve celebrations were also called off in nearby Banten province, where the disaster struck on 22 December killing more than 400 people.
In Japan, locals flocked to temples to ring in 2019, as US boxing superstar Floyd Mayweather came out of retirement to beat Japanese kickboxer Tenshin Nasukawa in a multi-million-dollar "exhibition" bout outside Tokyo.