Shanghai Pavilion will exhibit with the theme of “New Horizons Forever”

Shanghai’s “shikumen” houses are major style of the pavilion

Exterior walls of Shanghai Pavilion will be covered by 15,000 city photos

SHANGHAI invites people to a virtual reality tour to different eras of the city in the last 100 years, riding on various traffic tools being once popular in a shikumen-style building at the World Expo 2010, organizers revealed today.

Construction and outfitting finished today on the host city’s exhibition in China’s joint-provincial pavilion at the Expo, with the exhibition theme of “New Horizons Forever.”

Sixty audiences will sit in a ship-like platform that will move, fluctuate and rotate in a circular-screen theatre as the centerpiece of the exhibition.

The seat will imitate the feeling of sitting on rickshaw，a two-wheeled cart drawn by a runner and the trolley car, both being popular in Shanghai in 1930s, as well as modern buses and Metros.

A 7-minute movie, named Shanghai Forever, will take audiences back to the old Bund in 1930s, the popular commercial streets at the beginning of Reform and Opening Up in 1970s, the current Lujiazui financial center as well as “a city being surrounded by forest” in the future.

Some typical smells of different eras of the city will be added to the theatre.

Sixty people will be allowed to enter the pavilion every 15 minutes. Others can watch a pre-show movie named “Shanghai Concerto.” Some music from pianist Lang Lang, who is an ambassador of the 2010 event, will be played in the waiting area.

The 600-square-meter pavilion features an entrance resembling shikumen, a traditional stone-gated house initially built in the city in 1854 by Europeans.

The exterior walls of the 7-meter-tall Shanghai Pavilion will be covered by 15,000 of city photos, including many taken by residents and visitors.

The exhibition will be near the exit of the joint-provincial pavilion circling the China Pavilion, where the country’s 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions will present their exhibitions.

Beijing as well as Shanxi and Guizhou provinces have completed their exhibitions.

The organizer has received more than 40,000 entries for the design of the pavilion since it began to collect designs for the city’s exhibition at the beginning of last year.

Editor: Yang Jian