New bilingual album marks Canton Fair's 70 years as global trade connector

Canton Fair: 70 Years of Connecting the World, a bilingual photo documentary album, has been released to mark the 70th anniversary of the Canton Fair and the ongoing 140th session. 

The book offers a visual account of how the Canton Fair has served as a channel for foreign businesses to find suppliers, enter markets and build relationships with Chinese counterparts over seven decades.


Edited by the China Foreign Trade Centre and published by the Nanfang Daily Press, the album is divided into four chapters and 18 sections. Combining over 380 representative historical photographs with detailed written commentary, it follows a chronological timeline and major milestone events. 

A complete history of the Canton Fair is shown, from the venue in the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building to the Liuhua Road venue and the current Canton Fair Complex. This overview offers international readers a useful lens on how the fair scaled up to serve a growing number of overseas buyers and exhibitors.

Rather than a purely domestic institutional history, the album combines macro-level trade milestones with stories of individual Chinese and foreign merchants. It shows how the fair serves as a gateway for foreign buyers to access Chinese and Asian supply chains, from the latest products and suppliers to sourcing opportunities—a place where overseas buyers can discover new offerings and turn them into real business at a time when global trade patterns have shifted repeatedly.

Reporter | Huang Xinyi

Photos | Nanfang Plus

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