A grand show of lighting and fireworks were presented Friday evening for the opening ceremony of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.The show was staged alongside the city’s Huangpu River, attracting thousands of residents and tourists.The Expo is scheduled to last for six months from May 1 to Oct. 31, 2010.

China’s largest city, at the mouth of the Yangtze, began to evolve into the metropolis it is today in the 19th Century, when the British established a concession there after the first Opium War in 1842.

The city was known as the “Paris of the East” in the 1920s and 1930s for its beautiful buildings and prevalence of Western vogue and lifestyles.

After New China was founded in 1949, Shanghai was for decades the country’s top manufacturing base, with “made in Shanghai” snacks, clothing and light industrial products coveted by most Chinese people.

It was also among the first to benefit from China’s economic reforms that began in the late 1970s. The country’s first stock exchange opened there in 1990.

Today, the city of 18 million people is China’s financial hub with towering skyscrapers, a meeting point of migrant laborers, bankers, artists and businesspeople from around the globe, with more transnational marriages than elsewhere in China.

The Shanghai organizers, proud of their native culture yet eager to reach out to the world, adorned the international gathering with local elements. “We’re gonna see the world together ala nong,” sang Siedah Garrett and Jonathan Buck, two American singers of the theme song “Better city, better life”.

In Shanghai dialect, incomprehensible to most other Chinese, “ala” stands for “we” and “nong” means “you”.

Messages of welcome were conveyed in the songs, dances, the dazzling light and fireworks display on the Huangpu River that showed smiling faces, rainbows, as well as text messages of “EXPO” and “harmony”, and the friendly smiles of the Shanghainese.

“We’ve been looking forward to this,” said Zhang Wei, a volunteer at the Expo’s media center. He is among 72,000 volunteers at the Expo Park, a 5.28-square-km area straddling the Huangpu River.

About 2 million others are offering voluntary services across the city.