NZ Pavilion to highlight Maori culture

The New Zealand Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo will showcase the country's traditional Maori culture.

Philip Gibson, the country's Commissioner General for the Expo, inked a participation contract with Shanghai organizers on Monday.

The pavilion will have the theme "Cities of Nature: Living between Land and Sky", and be located on a 2000-square-meter site on the Pudong side.

The New Zealand Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo will showcase the country's traditional Maori culture.

The exhibition will tell a modern variation of the Maori story of how humans were created. In it forests and people are not seen as separate, but as different forms of the same creative spirit.

New Zealand will invest nearly 23 million US dollars at the Expo.