Shanghai's experiencing flashbacks worse than the last time you toured with Phish. Over the weekend, the China Pavilion saw numbers and lines reminiscent of last year's peak Expo days, with queuing times of up to four hours! 60,000 people visited the pavilion on Saturday and Sunday each, immediately forming lines stretching hundreds of meters. more ›

The 7th Chinese International Comics and Games Expo held at the China Pavilion was a smorgasbord of color and hyperkinetic noise, featuring dozens of exhibitors representing a variety of corners of respective toy, anime, and gaming universes. Children turned out in droves with parents in tow to sample the delights of their favorite fuzzy creatures in the flesh, and cosplay devotees nerded out with several thousand of their spiritual peers, with a sheepish tango involving posing and picture-snapping taking place throughout the Pavilion. more ›

"THE China Pavilion is to reopen from July 12 to October 10 with the same ticket price, 20 yuan (US$3), as before and the same exhibits, the Expo organizer said yesterday. The pavilion will open from 9am to 5pm every day expect for Mondays with the entrance on Xueye Road in the Pudong New Area. The pavilion received more than 9 million visitors during the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 and another 5.7 million after it reopened from December 1 to May 31 this year." [Shanghai Daily] more ›

One of the big draws of the China Pavilion was their "live watercolor" painting - a scroll that seemingly had come to life as the inhabitants within played amongst the brushwork. Now you can kind of see how it's done with this video for the China Bank of Communication. Awesome! more ›

Not that you were planning on going to the China pavilion during the holidays (because who would do a silly thing like that?) but the reopened pavilion extended its opening hours to 8pm from 5pm as attendance kept pushing its 50,000 capacity on both Saturday and Sunday. At noontime on Sunday, people had to line up two hours just to buy a ticket and then wait another four to get in. Officials expect huge crowds through 'til the end of Chinese New Year and would like to remind visitors that "there will be plenty of opportunities after the holiday as the pavilion is remaining open until the end of May." more ›

After the rush crowds of opening day and the 35,000 people who lined up to visit it this weekend, the China Pavilion is rethinking its ticket policy. Now, instead of having people line up willy nilly to get in whenever the line lets them, tickets to the pavilion will have specific dates and times on them. more ›

The China Pavilion officially reopened today, and true to form, tens of thousands of people rushed ticket offices near Yaohua Road Station of Metro Line 8. Crowds began gathering at 9:30am, and overwhelmed organizers reacted by more than doubling the open ticket windows (people still waited up to four hours) and calling in local police and armed soldiers for help. Enthusiasm for tickets was "far beyond their expectations." The Expo bureau official interviewed seemed about as baffled as we are, saying there's no need for the rush considering "we have enough tickets and people can buy as many as they want." more ›

We've heard the China Pavilion called everything from a grand symbol of the country's power to an overwrought and boringly simplistic copy of traditional Chinese architecture. Whatever you may think of it, it's now here - perhaps to stay? Urbanatomy has an informative interview about the man behind the pavilion, He Jingtang, dean of the South China University of Technology Architectural Design and Research Institute, whose team’s bid beat that of over 340 other applicants. more ›

The World Expo draws to a close in less than a month and Shanghai urban planning officials seek to turn the space into yet another busy city hub chock full of, not surprisingly, ritzy malls and high rise apartments. more ›

Lego aficionado Tsang Yiu Keung has built this microscale replica of the gigantic China Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. Not only is it built to scale, but it even lights up from the inside! Just like the real one - or at least it would be if there was a five-hour line of minifigs waiting outside. more ›

How much do Chinese people want to get in to see the Chinese Pavilion? So much that they're willing to camp outside overnight, waiting to be one of the first in the Expo to get their hands on one of the 30,000 reserve tickets. Said one guard, people start arriving at 2am to set up in front of Gate 6 at Yaohua Lu, an act that wasn't illegal, but is discouraged due to the hot weather. Usually, those are gone within five minutes of the gates opening, but the behavior is still bizarre considering the China Pavilion is the one thing you're guaranteed to see after Expo ends. more ›

Or as catherine mentions, it looks like the marching of the lemmings. more ›

A recent post by Paul French sent me on a search for a bunch of stuff about China at the 1900 Expo in Paris, France. This was apparently the first time China had participated in a French Expo officially, says expo1900. It featured, amongst other things, a Confucian Temple, representations of famous Chinese sites and displays of their most exported goods. more ›

I finally visited the Expo as a tourist this week (I know, it's taken me a while) and I have to admit, after all the news about tourists behaving badly there, I really, really went there praying all my worries were for naught. Unfortunately, I saw something so disgusting it made me actually shriek out loud. more ›

At least I hope that's what they call this video. My mom, who's been visiting the Expo every couple of weeks, and who most recently went before the doors had opened, first alerted me to this phenomena. more ›

Over the last two weeks, we've shown you quite a fair bit of what you'll see at the Shanghai Expo, but here's one place on the Expo grounds that 99.99% of you will never get to see even if you had all the money in the world -- because it's only used for visiting VVIPS coming to pay obeisance to China, like German President Horst Koehler who arrived in Shanghai from Beijing yesterday to visit the Expo. This picture of the VIP room at the China pavilion was shot by Deutsche Welle China correspondent Adrienne Woltersdorf who has been tweeting at @DW_China over the last few days and exciting Chinese Twitter users with her exclusive shots taken from inside Zhongnanhai in Beijing.
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More photos on the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site (and here). more ›

Shanghai Daily first alerted us to the fact that the Oriental Crown, China's pavilion for the World Expo, was given its first test light up yesterday night. The pretty awesome pic they snapped made us curious to see if we could find any slightly bigger ones. Well, turns out World Expo Blog has a couple sweet ones. Looks like that's the place to go for more Oriental Crown previewing! more ›

• China youth market blog enoVation labs went to the Antidote Electronic Music Fest in Zhujiajiao over the weekend... and they loved it! [enoVation]
• The former VP of mega-conglomerate Shanghai Huayi Group is now on trial in Shanghai on charges that he embezzled 57 million RMB, took 8.35 million RMB in bribes and illegally acquired 17.25 million RMB in assets. [Shanghai Daily]
• Several artists teamed up to paint a partially demolished building near the Moganshan Road art district. Unfortunately, as soon as it was done, it got peed on. [56minus1]