十九世紀以來，萬國博覽會代表著現代性最具有象徵意義的發明，博覽會代表貨品的展示，也宣示著生產的擴張以及資本市場的開拓，無怪乎班雅明(W. Benjamin)稱博覽會為「物品拜物教的朝聖殿堂」。博覽會也代表著慶祝國家重大事件的意義，更重要的是帶來了啟動都市建設的契機。近二十年來，萬國博覽會已經變成世上最具規模國際觀光活動，代表著將休閒、觀光、美學帶入了都市環境之中。然而在種種美麗的包裝下，萬國博覽會所包藏的禍心卻是帝國主義的意識形態作祟，處處充滿著殖民主義的意涵，這也就是本文所探討的要旨所在。在文中舉用之案例包含十九世紀以來在巴黎、倫敦、芝加哥等地舉辦的萬國博覽會之外，同時也涉及在日本殖民期間所舉辦的台灣博覽會。 本文利用薩伊德的“東方主義”的觀念，特別是有關殖民的論述中，指出東方在西方知識形成的過程中從未被徵詢過。西方所觀察到的東方變成通則，這些固定不變的通則變成了判定東方的文本。西方挾著霸權與知識為工具，讓東方根本無力去修正這些文本，而這些文本變成了詮譯東方的制式工具。十九世紀的萬國博覽會展場的分區上，正是處處充滿著強權與種族區隔的空間文本。在這個博覽世界中顯現出一幅充滿歧視的地圖，更是東方主義偏見下的結果，充滿著性別、種族、帝國的歧視。

International Expositions have signified as the most meaningful invention of modernity since the 19 (superscript th) century, which present not only the exhibition of commodities, but also the expansion of products and capital market. This is the reason that Walter Benjamin called International Expositions as the places of pilgrimage to the fetish commodity. International Expositions also present the meaning of celebrating the national grand event, and most importantly, which have brought with a great chance for starting urban development. Especially in the past 20 years, International Expositions have become international tourism activities in the most broad scale, which have brought recreation, tourism, aesthetics into the urban environment. Nevertheless, although camouflaged by the beautiful cover, the core of International Expositions indeed presents the ideology of imperialism, which is full of colonial meanings. To expose those meanings is therefore the aim of this study. The applied cases of the study are included as follows: Paris, London, Chicago respectively, and the Taiwanese Expositions that had been held during the Japanese colonial period are also used as the study cases. Edward Said's ”Orientalism”, especially the discourse of colonialism is used as the main concept of the discussion. Said has indicated that the East had never been informed by the West while they were processing their knowledge concerning eastern world. What the West had observed became the fixed general rules, then the general rules became the texts by which the West were using to evaluate the East. In terms of hegemony and powerful knowledge, the West had successfully forced the East unable to ratify those biased texts. The texts, then, became the formulated tools to interpret the East. The exhibit venues of 19-century International Expositions indeed presented as the spatial texts that apparently exposed the imperial hegemony and ethnical separation. The 19-century International Expositions represented a bias map, which is a map resulted in the notion of Orientalism and full of sexual, ethnical, imperial biases.