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 crenelated 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.
