Manufacturing Chineseness: The Mediationof Chinese Pavilions at Nineteenth-CenturyWorld Exhibitions

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, universal expositions played a formative role in shaping Euro-American understandings of cultures beyond their own, with pavilion architecture operating as an apparatus through which cultural difference was rendered visible, legible, and hierarchically ordered. Whereas scholarship has largely examined the Orientalist framing of Islamic and North African pavilions, the Chinese example constitutes a complementary yet comparatively understudied mode of architectural mediation. Though often accompanied by ethnographic narratives, they were often frequently reduced to ornamental signifiers, subjected to substitution, regional conflation, and theatrical staging. Focusing on the Paris (1867), Vienna (1873), and Chicago (1893) world’s fairs, this study analyzes how pavilion design, exhibition programming, and illustrated media collectively constructed what counted as “Chineseness” within exhibition culture. By foregrounding mediation rather than misrepresentation, it argues that these expositions produced the knowledge frameworks that situated Chinese architecture within a static, ornamental historical imaginary, profoundly shaping its visual memory and subsequent historiographical reception in the modern West.