World Expo draws to an end

THE staff and volunteers at the Shanghai World Expo bade farewell to a memorable six-month event on Oct 31. The 73 million visitors who had walked through the entrance of the 5.28sq km expo site helped the host rewrite history, surpassing the previous record attendance of 64.21 million at the 1970 fair in Osaka, Japan. Apart from the spectacular pavilions on show and the long queues, the expo would be remembered as one of the most special ever held in a developing country. Surely you have heard comments that the Malaysian Pavilion was like a pasar (wet market); the expo site was so huge that you could only cover one zone a day; the Mexican Pavilion was one of the most energy-conserving structures and the Chinese visitors littered everywhere.

Nobody was more qualified to assess the expo than the staff workers at the 100-odd pavilions who had received an average of 370,000 visitors a day. Cheng Ling Hui, who worked as an assistant at the Malaysian Pavilion, went through hell during the expo but the event had also offered her a wealth of life experiences. "I was in Britain when the then Malaysian Consul-General was in Shanghai and I started our correspondence on the possibility of working at the Malaysian Pavilion. "When the news came, I had packed to leave Britain for Shanghai though I did not know what was actually in store. "During the first week of my job, I was led to the construction site of the pavilion, and since then the workload had increased, from dealing with different companies from security, cleaning services to selecting volunteers and arranging training sessions for our dancers.

"Expo started on May 1 and everything was in good order to ensure the pavilion could be opened smoothly. As the event went along, the number of crowd rose by the weeks and months. "Then we realised the crowd came with almost only two intentions which were collecting lapel pins and expo stamps. It seemed as though the biggest attraction was no longer the pavilions themselves. "You could see the expo staff walk around the expo site with dozens of lapel pins they exchanged or collected hanging around their necks. The pins were made as a currency within the expo to bribe the security guards at different pavilions to gain fast entry to the expo site. "The crowd went extreme for the expo pavilion stamp. It was a tradition for expo visitors to obtain stamps from different pavilions for their Expo Passport as they visited the pavilions. "I have witnessed stamping materials ranging from the official expo passport to the expo ticket or expo map. A father even pressed his son's head to be stamped in our pavilion," she said.

Cheng, who graduated from Fudan University in Shanghai with a degree in museum management, supervised the pavilion's staff and handled reservation requests from various organisations and pavilions to visit the Malaysian Pavilion. Sometimes she had to double up as a guest relation hostess who accompanied VIP guests to the other pavilions they wanted to visit. Over the next few months, parties from the participating pavilions would move in to dismantle their pavilions. Only three to four pavilions such as the China Pavilion, Cultural and Performance Centre and the Thematic Pavilion will remain on site.

Three days before the expo ended, the UK Pavilion auctioned off a few thousand rods embedded with seedlings in the building with a starting price of 199 yuan (RM100). The pavilion will also donate some 1,000 rods to the China Children and Teenagers Fund, apart from another 1,000 to be given to schools for their environment protection initiatives. Some 20,000 rods will be given to the Royal Botanic Kew Garden in London and its partner the Kunming Institute of Botany.

The China Pavilion will reopen to the public next month while the Cultural and Performance Centre had already been booked for concerts and shows from next month until the middle of next year. The next expo will be in Yeosu, South Korea, in 2012, before moving to Milan in 2015. There is a possibility of the expo returning to China in 2025 if the Guangzhou local government wins its bid. So, goodbye Shanghai for now.

-thestar online.