If someone told you right before the Shanghai World Expo got started that there would be the fewest visitors at the UBPA (Urban Best Practices Area), you might think he was crazy.

The curators of UBPA were almost on the verge of going crazy after seven days' formal operation, since it seemed to be unusually cheerless compared to the booming and prosperous national museum in Pudong.

Nino, the curator of Madrid came to me and expressed his anxiety and vexation. "My God,” he said, “one day UBPA only welcomed about 8,000 visitors, and our pavilion only shared a few hundred of them. It's time to work out some solutions."

Over the next few days, curators of Bilbao, Hamburg, Osaka, Bremen, Alsace, Freiburg and other cities’ pavilions came to find me regarding the same problem—what should they do to confront such a low volume of visitors?

It must be pointed out that there are nearly 80 city pavilions in the whole practice area, with 14 real pavilions among them—it is unbelievable!

In fact, I have no time to think about this problem, since we are the best performers in terms of the number of tourists in the practice area, which distracts us from the small number of overall visitors.

An unofficial inter-pavilion conference will be held in the wake of the first week of the first month for the World Expo operation, with the goal of boosting the number of visitors and improving facilities. This phenomenon has aroused the attention of the government, mass media and managers, who will spare no effort to get the situation changed.

Vaguely, I felt that less attention has been paid to UBPA. Therefore, the Daming Palace blog I am going to work on will get started here with the aim of unfolding the splendid UBPA in an all-around way.

By Liu Lei