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A tale of two cities’ expos

Swiss tennis star Roger Federer visited the Shanghai Expo 10 October 2010 and in less than a week, 16 October, the fair had its busiest day. Federer is a mega-star in China. Coincidence?

World fairs, world expos and their cousins are a strange breed: here today with much excitement and at great cost, generating all kinds of unreasonable expectations, and then poof! gone tomorrow. I had barely finished watching the Chinese-style mammouth dancing and singing and acrobatics finale to the Shanghai Expo on the BBC when I spotted Monday morning photos on Xinhua showing yesterday’s glorious pride of modern China as a giant de-construction site.

And that is the nature of the beast, starting with the first one, the 1851 London Expo, if Bill Bryson is right. I spent some of my October holiday reading his At Home: A History of Private Life, where I learned about how plate glass windows came into being and the near-fiasco of the first World Exposition, whose glory was the Crystal Palace, but only after the fair nearly didn’t happen because no one was interested.

The Crystal Palace: “It had taken just five months to build. It was a miracle that it was built at all. Less than a year earlier it had not even existed as an idea. The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history’s attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card (as a way of encouraging people to use the new penny post). In 1849, Cole visited the Paris Exhibition—a comparatively parochial affair, limited to French manufacturers-and became keen to try something similar in England, but grander.”

So the French did it first, but only for the home crowds. To be honest, despite efforts to scale up world expositions or fairs by adding the word “world”, starting with the London one, the home crowd has always been the key one. Criticisms of the Shanghai Expo that say it attracted mainly Chinese forget that most other world fairs have done the same: our expectations of something gloriously international, not those of the fair organizers who keep a clear eye on the home crowd, are to blame here.

The Economist published a thoughtful piece on what to expect from Shanghai, back in April. “Officials tend to avoid the term ‘theme park’ to describe the expo, but that is what it is. Long gone are the days of the Great Exhibition in London of 1851, the progenitor of all expos, when the point was to show off manufactured goods (and British industrial strength). Shanghai’s expo grandly states its purpose as being to stimulate discussion of ‘urban maladies. ‘Better city, better life’ is its slogan. Sometimes officials call it China’s ‘economic Olympics’ as if it were a huge trade fair where business deals are struck (it is not).”

Two things were expected to happen, the Economist suggested: patriotic pride would get a boost and people would have fun. Both appear to have happened, so on that score, Shanghai was a success.

But ad man Tom Doctoroff, writing in the Huffington Post, argues that Shanghai was a letdown. “The world’s response to Shanghai’s self-proclaimed moment in the sun has been been a gigantic, collective yawn. And no wonder.” Some of the architecture was good, he says, but little else impressed him. Worse, “the Shanghai government did precious little to entice foreign travelers. Its public relations efforts—a bizarre fusion of propagandist ‘bureaucrat-ese’ and brain-dead imagery dominated by an omnipresent, neotonized, pale-blue creature named ‘Hai Bao’—ensured overseas figures remained below projections of (only) 5 million people.” But the government “had its eyes focused squarely on domestic concerns” and on this level it was a great success, he says.

That’s the rub. It works if you forget the “universal” bit, but 158 countries have signed the 1928 convention that regulates the business. The notion of universal fairs possibly has continuing appeal because no one has ever really pulled one off, although every five years someone tries again. Next time around it’s Milan, in 2015.

Coming back to the Economist‘s forecast for Shanghai, “the city’s lavish spending on the expo is all the more striking given how lacklustre a brand World Expos (or World’s Fairs as they are sometimes known) have become in the developed world. Few even remember the last such event held in Aichi, Japan, in 2005, let alone the one in Zaragoza, Spain, in 2008, which in the arcane terminology of the business, dictated by the Bureau International des Expositions in Paris, did not actually count as a full-scale ‘universal’ expo.”

And even the great one, the first one, the London one, stunned the world, but primarily the world at home, where it reinforced a sense of pride in the British Empire that remained long after the fair ended, in part because the colonies, including Australia and New Zealand, sent many of the 13,000 exhibits, according to wikipedia.

Bryson recalls that the palace of the Great Exhibition was built at a reasonable price, thanks to political luck that brought down the price of glass at just the right moment, and that the exhibit itself made a profit, two things that will dampen criticism of projects in most countries. “The finished building was precisely 1,851 feet long (in celebration of the year), 408 feet across, and almost 110 feet high along its central spine-spacious enough to enclose a much admired avenue of elms that would otherwise have had to be felled. Because of its size, the structure required a lot of inputs-293,655 panes of glass, 33,000 iron trusses, and tens of thousands of feet of wooden flooring-yet thanks to Paxton’s methods, the final cost came in at an exceedingly agreeable £80,000. From start to finish, the work took just under thirty-five weeks. St. Paul’s Cathedral had taken thirty-five years.”

The Crystal Palace remained standing until 1936, when it burned down, but part of its legacy was to teach the world that you could quickly put up marvelous structures for all to admire and just as quickly pull them down and get on with daily life, and in the process you might have stirred up pride at home, always a useful thing for governments.

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