Q. How many attendees are expected to visit Expo 2010?
A. An estimated 70 million people will visit Expo 2010, between its opening on May 1st, 2010, and its closing on October 31, 2010. That’s nearly 12 times the number of attendees at the first official world’s fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations in London. The current attendance record for a world’s fair is currently held by Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Japan, which drew a whopping 64 million. The one-day attendance record was set at Expo ‘67 in Montreal — with 569,000 visitors pouring in on the fair’s third day.

The list below shows the wide range of world’s fair attendance since 1851. If Expo 2010 achieves its goal of 70 million visitors, it will exceed the standing record at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan by about 9.5 percent.

Q. Who built the pavilions at Expo 2010? 
A. You’ll see three types of pavilion structures at Expo 2010: those built by the participants, such the United States and Japan; individual pavilions constructed by the expo organizers that they then rent to participants; and joint pavilions built by the expo organizers that they then rent to developing nations who are unable to afford the often extravagant sums required to build their own.

Q. What was the first world’s fair? 
A. The first true modern world’s fair was the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, which took place in 1851 in London. Attended by 6.2 million people, its DNA has since been cloned by all world’s fairs and even trade shows many times since then, including conceptual anchor such as:

• Cutting-edge architecture. The Great Exhibition’s crown jewel was the Crystal Palace, the McCormick Place of its day. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton in just 10 days, and built in only nine months, the 746,592-square-foot glass-and-iron exhibit hall was so huge that management was forced to bring in hawks to control the rogue sparrow population, which flew in the Palace’s many entrances to scavenge the litter of free food left by its six million visitors.
  
  
• New product launches. Voting machines, flush toilets, the McCormick reaper, and Colt revolvers debuted there. The expo was also the site of the first major international exhibition of photography, an art and amusement that was still in development.

• Live product demos. English physicist Frederick Bakewell demonstrated an early version of what became the fax machine. Visitors could also view cotton production from spinning the raw material to the finished cloth, while gazing later at a machine that cut, gummed, folded, and stacked envelopes.

• Oversized props, extreme entertainment, and bizarre attractions. A 4-ton crystal fountain squirted water 250 feet in the air; a 600-voice choir serenaded Queen Victoria; a stuffed elephant, a reconstruction of the Dodo bird, and the first life-sized reproductions of dinosaurs awed attendees with their depiction of nature’s oddities.

• Celebrity-for-celebrity’s-sake appearances. The exhibition was attended by numerous notable figures of the time, including Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Lewis Carroll, Charles Darwin, Charlotte Bronte, and Czar Alexander II of Russia.

• Profit. The show sponsor raked in $17.5 million, measured in today’s currency.

Q. What is the mascot for Expo 2010?
A. Resembling a cross between a Gumby doll and a Smurf sperm, the mascot for Expo 2010 is named “Haibao.” Chosen from 26,655 entries received in a worldwide, four-month-long contest, the final winning design was derived from a Chinese character which means “people.” After an 11-member panel selected the concept, which had been submitted by the Shanghai design company, Yokan Corporate Identity, another panel subsequently revised that original entry into the current mascot after a three-month process.

The name Haibao itself translates as “the treasure of the seas,” which is reflected in its blue hue, suggesting the coastal waters bordering Shanghai. According to the official Expo 2010 site, Haibao’s “round body represents a well-off life, which is also lovely and cute.”

Haibo’s Pillsbury Doughboy-like anatomy is the current norm for world’s fair mascots. Almost 30 years ago, the mascots at the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, TN, looked like hillbillified knockoffs of the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese’s, while the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans represented itself with a pelican in a turquoise top hat. But these anthropomorphized animals gave way to pudgy blobs of often indistinct sexuality. Beginning with Expo 1986 in Vancouver, Canada, for example, the fair trotted out Expo Ernie, a robot equipped with a marshmallow-like body topped by a bowling ball-shaped head. Similarly, Twipsy, the mascot for Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany, was a genderless creature known for its oversized mouth, exaggerated proboscis, a human hand for its right arm, and a plant for its left arm.

While Haibao is Expo 2010’s main mascot, it isn’t the only one, and it is far from the most unusual. Belgium uses the Smurfs, which were created by Belgian cartoonist Pierre Culliford in 1958. Popular in China since the 1980s — possibly because the stumpy blue characters have often been perceived as communists who dutifully contribute to society for the greater good of the masses— the Smurfs are as culturally specific to Belgium as “Durian Boy” is to Singapore. The sac-shaped “Durian Boy” mascot’s effervescent smile belies its origins as a durian, a fruit that, as “Kitchen Confidential” author Anthon Bourdain put it, will leave your “breath smell[ing] as if you’d been French-kissing your dead grandmother.”

Durian Boy may be the funkiest but he is not the most incongruous. That honor may go to the Oil Pavilion’s Youbaobao (“Baby Oil”). Sponsored by China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., China National Offshore Oil Corp., and China National Petroleum Corp., the cube-shaped Oil Pavilion uses the solar-yellow Youbaobao to shill for the “contributions that petroleum has made to urban development.” Presumably, “urban development” does not include the Gulf of Mexico or the Niger delta.

Q. What is the official theme of the Expo? Why was it selected?
A. The theme for Expo 2010 is “Better City, Better Life.” The motto refers to the manifold challenges of living in an urban environment, which, according to the United Nations, 55 percent of the world does today. Because urbanization has occurred at such a breakneck pace — in 1950, just 29 percent of the world resided in metropolitan areas — cities have been buried under an avalanche of seemingly intractable problems with few solutions, from pollution and poverty to overcrowding and ethnic strife. With nine of the world’s megalopolises now crowded with at least 10 million or more inhabitants, and Shanghai itself the world’s most populous city of them all with an estimated 19 million residents, the theme seems as timely and relevant a motif as could be. 

Specifically, the Expo 2010 “Better City, Better Life ” symbolizes exhibitors ’ efforts to show how we can better blend diverse cultures, generate economic prosperity, and inspire innovations of science and technology in the city.

The committee-made vanilla theme is also guaranteed to offend virtually no one. Typically, world’s fairs choose a theme to address the anxieties of the era and allay them through the panacea of technology and science. With the dark chill of World War II descending from Europe, the 1939 New York World’s Fair invoked a bright future after the storm, with the slogan ”Building The World of Tomorrow.” The pain of the Cold War and Vietnam could be tempered if not healed with the sentiment behind the 1964 New York World’s Fair, ”Peace Through Understanding.” In Montreal, Expo ’67 took its theme, “Man and His World,” from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s hopeful 1939 book “Wind, Sand and Stars.” The rhetorical rallying cry for Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan was “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.”

Since then the belief in technology, progress, and the up-with-people optimism of world’s fairs suffered mortal blows from the technological terrors of the space shuttle Challenger, the Chernobyl calamity, the Y2K panic, and more. Now that technology is seen as a neutral tool, instead of a magic wand, world’s fairs have sanded down their themes. Thus you now see comparably blander slogans such as that of Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany, “Humankind, Nature, Technology,” and the theme from Expo 2005 in Aichi Prefecture in Japan, “Nature's Wisdom.”


Q. How many countries are participating this year?
A. There are 192 nations registered for Expo 2010. Included in this number are 186 independent countries that are recognized by the United Nations, as well as two that are not, Taiwan and Palestine. Also represented in the 192 are New Zealand’s associated states of Cook Islands and Niue, and China’s two special administrative regions (SAR), Hong Kong and Macau.

Kuwait, Bhutan, and Burkina Faso had originally intended to take part but later withdrew for undisclosed reasons. Of itself, this is not unusual. According to the Paris- based Bureau of International Expositions, which governs world’s fairs, there is an 8 to 10 percent dropout rate of countries at any given expo. Based on that figure, the attrition rate is significantly lower at Expo 2010 than usual, at just 1.6 percent.

Along with the nearly 200 countries, there are also 50 international organizations and non-governmental organizations taking part at Expo 2010. These run a spectrum of concerns, from the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Overall, the 242 participating countries and organizations exceeds the previous record of 172 set at the Expo 2000 event in Hanover, Germany by more than 60 percent.

Below is an alphabetized list of the countries, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations exhibiting at Expo 2010.

Participating counties (192)

A
Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Angola
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Austria
Australia
Azerbaijan
 
B
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belgium
Belize
Benin
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Brazil
Brunei
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Burundi
 
 
C
Cambodia
Cameroon
Canada
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Chad
Chile
China
Colombia
Comoros
Cook Islands
Costa Rica
Côte d’Ivoire
Croatia
Cuba
Cyprus
Czech Republic
 
 
D
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Denmark
Djibouti
Dominica
Dominican Republic
 
 
E
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
 
 
F
Federated States of Micronesia
Fiji
Finland
France
 
 
G
Gabon
Gambia
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Greece
Grenada
Guatemala
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
 
H
Haiti
Honduras
Hong Kong
Hungary
 
I
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
 
 
J
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
 
 
K
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kiribati
Kyrgyzstan
Kuwait
 
L
Laos
Latvia
Lebanon
Lesotho
Liberia
Libya
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
 
 
M
Macau
Macedonia
Madagascar
Malaysia
Maldives
Malawi
Mali
Malta
Marshall Islands
Mauritania
Mauritius
Mexico
Moldova
Monaco
Mongolia
Montenegro
Morocco
Mozambique
Myanmar
 
 
 
N
Namibia
Nauru
Nepal
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Niue
North Korea
Norway
 
O
Oman

P
Pakistan
Palau
Palestinian Authority
Panama
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Papua New Guinea
Poland
Portugal
 
 
Q
Qatar
 
 
R
Republic of the Congo
Romania
Russia
Rwanda
 
S
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Samoa
San Marino
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Serbia
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
 Singapore
Slovakia
Slovenia
Solomon Islands
Somalia
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Suriname
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
 
 
T
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
Timor-Leste
Togo
Tonga
Trinidad and Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Tuvalu
 
U
Uganda
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
 
 
V
Vanuatu
Venezuela
Vietnam
 
Y
Yemen
 
Z
Zambia
Zimbabwe

Participating international organizations and non-governmental organizations (50)

A
African Union
ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations)
 
B
Boao Forum for Asia
 
C
CAMESA (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa)
Caribbean Development Bank
CARICOM (Caribbean Community )
CIS (Commonwealth of Indepent States)
Convention on Biological Diversity
 
E
EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites)
European Union

F
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization)
Forum Francophone des Affaires

G
Global Environment Facility
Group on Earth Observations
 
I
IEA (International Energy Agency)
IFRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies)
IAPT (International Association of Public Transport)
ICM (International Council of Museums)
IMO (International Maritime Organization)
International Development Information Network Association-DEVNET
International Network for Bamboo and Rattan
ITU (International Telecommunication Union)
 
J
Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS

L
League of Arab States
 
 
O
OCDE (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)
OIEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)
 
 
P
Pacific Islands Forum
 
 
S
South Pacific Tourism Organization
 

T
TWO (World Touruism Organziation)

U
UNCTAD(United Nations Conference on Trade and Development)
UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme)
UNESCO(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
UN-HABITAT
UNICEF
UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization)
United Cities and Local Governments
United Nations

United Nations Capital Development Fund
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
United Nations Population Fund
 
 
W
WHO (World Health Organization)
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization)
WMO (World Meteorological Organization)
World Bank
World Trade Centers Association
World Water Council
WTO (World Trade Organization)
WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature)