China's pavilion was a small walled city in Chinese palace architecture, arranged around a garden court. It was designed in Peking by engineers of the Department of the Interior, built in Shanghai, shipped knocked down, and erected by Shanghai workmen, whom the Official Guide says Congress admitted by special act. Smiling stone lions guarded the gates. Past a carved pailou arch, a pagoda and drum tower flanked the portal. Across the gardens stood a double-roofed copy of the Imperial Audience Hall. To one side was a copy of the Tai-ho-Tien, used as a Temple of Ceremonies, and opposite it a copy of a Chinese home, with tea houses by the entrance.
The compound covered about 100,000 square feet of a two-and-a-half-acre site. Todd thought the crenellated wall good psychology: 'It fenced out the world.' Inside were carved screens, scrolls, porcelain-topped tables, and silver models of a Canton temple and a five-story pagoda. China's larger exhibits, nearly 69,000 square feet of them, were in the palaces.
The crenelated wall was good psychology. It fenced out the world.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. III (1921), p. 289
At a glance
- Compound about 100,000 sq ft on a 2.5-acre site.
- Pavilion and exhibits cost less than $200,000 gold (Todd); the Official Guide gives China's appropriation as $750,000.
- Site dedicated October 24, 1912, with a 21-gun salute; ground broken July 17, 1914; dedicated March 9, 1915.
Afterward
Offered to the City of San Francisco; as of 1921 the city had not taken it (Todd V, p. 246). Later fate unverified.
Sources
- Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. III (1921), ch. XXXV, p. 198
- Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. III (1921), ch. LIV, pp. 287-292
- Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. V (1921), ch. XXXVII, p. 246 (fate)
- Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), p. 45
- Museum of the City of San Francisco, Panama-Pacific International Exposition Map (1915), China beside Canada