China's World's Fair of 1910: Lessons from a Forgotten Event

From before the turn of the century, the great powers held large commercial, industrial and technological exhibitions to show off the fruits of progress and to give their citizens a glimpse of where civilization was headed. World fairs thus provided one window into the future. But it must be remembered that such events also constructed monuments to their own era—an age when jingoism and a paradoxical recognition of the shrinking nature of the globe coexisted before the road to war. In the final analysis, the grand exposition, with its curiosity about other peoples and nations and its faith nonetheless that mechanical invention would soon make everyone much the same, was a place where imperialists met in thinly disguised competition. How strange it must seem, then, to learn that the last Chinese dynasty, having just discovered the power of nationalism, attempted an international exposition of its own in the summer of 1910 at the same time that the ‘Festival of Empire Exhibition’ was booked into London's famed Crystal Palace.