From showcasing the Eiffel Tower to a Moon rock, World Expos have long been a stage for innovation and national pride. This year’s six-month Expo kicked off in the Japanese city of Osaka on Sunday.
Expo 2025 kicked off Sunday in the Japanese city of Osaka but in the age of online information and mass tourism, what is the purpose of a World’s Fair?
The huge events, which draw millions of visitors to a chosen city every five years or so, hark back to London’s 1851 Great Exhibition held inside the Crystal Palace.
As 160 countries and regions show off their technological and cultural achievements at the six-month Osaka Expo, FRANCE 24 looks at what it’s all about:
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What is a World Expo?
Expanding on national expositions in Paris at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Imperial Britain built an immense glass Crystal Palace to host 14,000 exhibitors from 40 countries.
That marked the start of the Expo phenomenon that over the decades introduced the world to ketchup, the telephone and X-ray machines among myriad other technologies.
Historically, World’s Fairs did not just exhibit new technologies but also included racist displays of actual people from the colonies of the time.
Do we still need Expos?
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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