An effective marketing campaign, with advertisements across all of China's major cities, persuaded millions more to head to Shanghai.

The number of visitors to the Shanghai Expo is more than ten times the figure who attended the Beijing Olympics and has eclipsed the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan, which drew 64 million tourists.

After a shaky start, with two weeks of low attendance, officials in the city pulled out all the stops to ensure that the event would live up to its billing and justify the ￡35 billion spent on the exhibits and on improving Shanghai's infrastructure.

With so many people on the site, queues at the most popular pavilions have stretched for up to eight hours.

Almost all of the 70 million visitors were Chinese, hoping for a chance to "travel the world" by visiting the national pavilions of the 190 countries taking part.

With the Expo due to close its doors next weekend, the last two weekends have been particularly frantic, with more than one million visitors attending on the second Saturday of October and a further 870,000 braving typhoon rains at the outdoor site last Saturday.

Meanwhile, Yang Yu, a 23-year-old student from Hunan province, said the Expo had created a good image for China, but that she had visited on a free ticket.

"The Expo was a must see, otherwise we would have had regrets. We almost grew sick of all the advertisements, on the television, radio, on the planes, trains. But I feel proud now to have made it."

"Everyone knows how suspicious the figure is. Over half the tickets were free, given out to government departments, state-run companies, Shanghai residents and as gifts from department stores and so on."

"If the crowds had been lower, it would probably have been more fun, but then it wouldn't have made China look so good, and the Shanghai government would have been embarrassed."