Bargains galore in World Expo's final three days

With just three days left before the curtain falls on Shanghai's World Expo, the gargantuan fair park is becoming a bargain-hunter's dream.

Souvenir shops, illegal trinket hawkers and even ticket touts have been desperately slashing prices over the past few weeks in a scramble to offload surplus stock - to the extent that the park is starting to resemble a huge jumble sale.

'We started reducing prices on October 1,' said Huang Shiliang at the Romania pavilion's souvenir kiosk, where most items have been cut to half price or less. 'Everybody is doing the same all over the expo park. Nobody wants to be caught with a warehouse full of unsold goods next week.

'Business hasn't been exactly fantastic recently and we still have a fair amount to get rid of. Thankfully we were careful not to import too much at one go and limited ourselves to manageable quantities.'

Around the perimeter of the park, scalpers patrol the gates, surreptitiously offering cut-price tickets to arriving visitors - starting prices are currently as low as 100 yuan, half the official value of the final week's peak-rate tickets.

Expo rules ban visitors from hawking inside the park - but that doesn't stop people trying.

'It's not so bad, I spent just under 200 yuan on them,' said one middle-aged woman after security guards confiscated dozens of tiny expo-branded toys she had tried to sneak in inside her trousers. 'Sometimes you can get through, but I wasn't so lucky today.'