2010 Shanghai World Expo

Ancient Babylon city present at Expo

Saddam’s Presidential Palace and ruins of ancient Babylon

The Shanghai World Expo with the theme “Better City, Better Life”, not only displays advanced ideas for urban life, but some old ideas as well, including some from mankind’s oldest city Babylon. The ancient urban center, which had its heyday about 4,000 years ago, is also exhibited at the Babylon’s city gate serves as the entrance of the City Origin hall of the Urban Footprints Pavilion. 

Visitors stand in awe of the ancient Babylon city in miniature. The city thrived during king Hammurabi’s rule in 18th century BC, and Nebuchadnezzar the second’s reign around 6th century BC. 

King Nebuchadnezzar’s Palace in ancient Babylon

Wei Shaonong, Chairman, Design Dept., East China Normal University, said, “Babylon is famous for its hanging garden, one of the seven wonders of the world, and the legendary Tower of Babel described in the Bible.” 

Ishtar Gate, the biggest of Babylon’s eight gates, is displayed here with models and real relics.

Original Walls of Babylon, 604 to 562 B.C.

These glazed ceramics are the genuine pieces decorating Ishtar Gate. The divine animals, molded some three thousand years ago, are still in good condition. This figure, with a snake’s head, goat’s horn and eagle’s claw represents such an early combination of such animals that it even surprised the experts.

Wei Shaonong said, “Combining features from different animals to create a godly creature, making it boast all the energy the animals have, this showcases the wild imagination of Babylon citizens.” 

Dozens of relics are exhibited to inform visitors of ancient Babylonian culture, from their ancient epigraphs, to an engraved stone indicating ownership of land.

Plan of the ancient city of Babylon, 500 B.C.

Babylon, was a city-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which are found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province Iraq, about 85 kilometers (55 mi) south of Baghdad. All that remains of the original ancient famed city of Babylon today is a mound, or tell, of broken mud-brick buildings and debris in the fertile Mesopotamian plain between the Tigrils and Euphrats rivers, in Iraq. Although it has been reconstructed, historical resources inform us that Babylon was at first a small town, that had sprung up by the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. The town flourished and attained prominence and political repute with the rise of the First Babylonian Dynasty. It was the holy city of Babylonia by approximately 2300 BC, and the seat of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 612 to 539 BC. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. 

A Blessing to the Shanghai Expo a Century Ago

In 1910, a Qing Dynasty Novelist named Shi’e Lu, he was finished a fantasy novel named The New China. This fiction is divided into 12 chapters and it imagined the Shanghai after one hundred years. In the novel, in China, Shanghai Pudong will hold a Expo, tourists are going to our Shanghai. From the novel be published in 1910 to the Shanghai Expo hold in 2010, during one hundred’s prophecy has mysteriously fulfilled.

In The New China, the hero Yunxiang Lu and his wife Youqin Li is travel in Shanghai in dreams, he find with surprise “The foreign settlement has call in; the arrogant foreigner is respect for us. There are lots of new things; the electric car is on the underground road, what’s more, a big railway across the Huangpu River straight to the other side.” His wife told to him “During the Shanghai Expo, in order to convenient the passer-by, the government built this bridge.” Through the bridge, there are lots of tall buildings and the smooth flow of traffic.

In the ending, the hero was tripped over and he was awaked. There is a dialogue between the hero and his wife. His wife said that “you are dream for a long time, so you have this odd dream”. The hero answered that “It maybe comes true until that time”

Now, the Huangpu Bridge, the cross-river tunnel, the Subway, the Expo Park has all come true. The details of the prophecy novel are coincided after 100 years, after a century, Shanghai has held the world Expo.

Today we see the book, from the several aspects of consideration; it is a blessing to our country a century ago, a blessing to the Shanghai Expo a century ago.

Wendy, Shanghai World Expo, Shanghai Expo