Europe’s 1889 exhibition replicated Cairo as a deliberately aged stage set

Evidence

The Egyptian delegation to the Eighth International Congress of Orientalists, held in Stockholm in the summer of 1889, travelled to Sweden via Paris and paused there to visit the World Exhibition. The four Egyptians spent several days in the French capital, climbing twice the height (as they reported) of the Great Pyramid in Alexandre Eiffel’s new tower, and exploring the city laid out beneath. They visited the carefully planned parks and pavilions of the exhibition, and examined the merchandise and machinery on display. Amid this order and splendour there was only one thing that disturbed them. The Egyptian exhibit had been built by the French to represent a winding street of Cairo, made of houses with overhanging upper stories and a mosque like that of Qaitbay. ‘It was intended’, one of the Egyptians wrote, ‘to resemble the old aspect of Cairo.’ So carefully was this done, he noted, that ‘even the paint on the buildings was made dirty’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s ‘On Sacrifice’ interest in how colonizers staged other cultures, and to Edward Said’s orientalism literature on European spectacles of the East.
• SHARE: Perfect for someone researching the 1889 Paris Exposition or the history of world’s fair colonial exhibits — the detail that French painters dirtied the buildings for verisimilitude is a telling micro-fact.