NZ pavilion set to wow Chinese crowds

WELCOME HOME: The New Zealand Pavilion at the World Expo, Shanghai, China, is expected to attract 40,000 people a day.

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Canterbury's input into the New Zealand Pavilion for the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai is growing, as are hopes the expo will stimulate Kiwi exports to China.

Construction of the $32 million Kiwi pavilion is well under way. It is expected to draw in 40,000 people a day when the expo event runs for 184 days from May 1 to October 31.

New Zealand commissioner-general for the expo, Phillip Gibson, has just returned from Shanghai with a progress report on the pavilion, saying it is on budget and schedule for the Christchurch architecture firm Warren & Mahoney-designed building.

New Zealand's growing trade with China – with exports up from $1.9 billion in 2008 to $3.3b in 2009 – was just one reason Kiwis should sit up and take notice of an event the Asian country is spending US$45b (NZ$61.1b) to US$50b on, he said.

It was the biggest World Expo, and the Chinese were talking of it as the biggest grouping of people for a drawn-out timeline event of its kind, Gibson said.

About 70 million visitors – mainly Chinese – were expected on the downtown 5.2 square kilometre site straddling the Huangpu River, and the Kiwi stand had been picked by local media as a "must visit" part of the event.

"Now why are (the Chinese doing it)? Well I think there's a tectonic shift taking place in world political and economic power towards north Asia, in particular China. This essentially is part of China's coming out party to the world," he said.

The Kiwi pavilion was backed by corporates including Christchurch headquartered Solid Energy, and about $2 million of sponsorship. Solid Energy had also been a sponsor of the Aichi, Japan expo in 2005.

Canterbury organisations including the council, the Canterbury Employers' Chamber of Commerce, and the Canterbury Development Corp were also involved.

Regional representation would likely come from Wellington, Hawke's Bay, New Plymouth, Otago/Southland and Auckland.

The pavilion would use wide-screens (some on "Pou" poles) to allow visitors to get a sense of New Zealand via a visit from the shoreline, into the city and suburbs and then out to the country by watching moving and still images on the screens. He said occasionally a strong southerly would whip through the building, but only via the screen images rather than to the discomfort of the visitors.

The 2000 square metre pavilion site was once a Shanghai steel mill, and the building would be close to the Chinese building.

Visitors would be met by kapa haka (traditional Maori) groups with about 60 to 70 Kiwis due to attend the site and help make the New Zealand experience a friendly and welcoming one, he said.

The Maori theme would continue with the entrance to the building looked over by Tane – who according to mythology was the god of forests and of birds, and the son of Ranginui and Papatuanuku, the sky father and the earth mother.

The theme for the pavilion was "Cities of Nature: Living between Land and Sky", partly inspired by the Maori creation story. There would also be many Chinese-speaking Kiwis, to explain the "day-in-the-life" presentation via the screens seen by visitors treading along a 112 metre long internal walkway, Gibson said. Visitors would eventually emerge onto a rooftop garden.

Nowadays 86 per cent of Kiwis lived in urban environments, and the need to adapt cities for higher and higher percentages of populations was a theme of the wider expo, he said. "To give expos a degree of coherency each one has a theme."