Acrylic rods of UK Pavilion at Expo to be auctioned for charity
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Limited edition rods, with seeds inside, from the award-winning UK Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo will be auctioned online from Oct. 28 to raise money for children with cerebral palsy, a senior pavilion official announced Monday.
Carma Elliot, British Consul-General in Shanghai and Acting Commissioner General of the UK Pavilion, said money collected from the auction on China's e-commerce website, Taobao, would be donated to the Shanghai-based CereCare Wellness Center.
She did not say how many rods would be auctioned.
Buyers would have to wait for the pavilion to be taken down and the rods cut from the original 7.5-meter-long rods after the Expo closed on Oct. 31, said Elliot.
The pavilion would also give 1,000 rods to the China Children and Teenagers Fund.
Elliot said 20,000 of the 60,000 acrylic rods in which seeds have been encased will be given to the Royal Botanic Garden Kew in London and its Chinese partner, the Kunming Institute of Botany, which supplied the seeds.
Another 1,000 rods would be distributed to Chinese schools that were involved in the "Green Your School" and "Climate 4 Classrooms" programs initiated by the British Council to inspire young people to take part in protecting biodiversity, said Elliot.
She said the Chinese public gave the UK pavilion the nickname the Dandelion, and just like the dandelion, the seeds spread around the world, around China.
"The seeds of the ideas that we developed here and seeds of partnerships that we have will start new life as they go off around China," she said.
Most of the pavilion's building materials and equipment would be recycled except for significant and representative parts that would be donated to a permanent Expo museum in Shanghai, said UK Pavilion director Lorna Miles.
The UK pavilion, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, has won the Lubetkin Prize, Britain's top international architectural award. It has received 8 million visitors at the Expo.
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