Exhibitors were housed in different buildings that were erected for this exposition, including the
Rotunda (), a large circular building in the great park of
Prater designed by the Scottish engineer
John Scott Russell. (The fair Rotunda was destroyed by fire on 17 September 1937.)
Italian pavilion Professor Lodovico Brunetti of
Padua,
Italy first displayed cremated ashes at the exhibition. He showed a model of the
crematory, one of the first modern ones. He exhibited it with a sign reading, "Vermibus erepti, puro consummimur igni," in English, "Saved from the worms, we are consumed by the flames."
Japanese pavilion The
Japanese exhibition at the fair was the product of years of preparation. The empire had received its invitation in 1871, close on the heels of the
Meiji Restoration, and a government bureau was established to produce an appropriate response.
Shigenobu Okuma,
Tsunetami Sano, and its other officials were keen to use the event to raise the international standing of
Japanese manufactures and boost
exports. 24 engineers were also sent with its delegation to study cutting-edge Western
engineering at the fair for use in
Japanese industry. Art and cultural relics at the exhibit were verified by the Jinshin Survey, a months-long inspection tour of various imperial,
noble, and
temple holdings around the country. The most important products of each
province were listed and two specimens of each were collected, one for display in Vienna and the other for preservation and display within Japan. Forty-one Japanese officials and government interpreters, as well as six Europeans in Japanese employ, came to Vienna to oversee the pavilion and the fair's cultural events. 25 craftsmen and gardeners created the main pavilion, as well as a full
Japanese garden with
shrine and a model of the
former pagoda at
Tokyo's imperial temple. Some items of art were later recovered. One of the items is a ceramic square dish with grapes by
Ogata Kenzan that was exhibited and was recovered.
New Zealand pavilion New Zealand was represented at the 1873 Vienna World's Fair by a collection of
Māori clubs, mats and cloaks, as well as gold, woodwork,
kauri gum and geological specimens. Photographs of New Zealand scenery were shown and examples of flour and beer were provided by local industries. A collection of birds was prepared by a London taxidermist and Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary was said to have been "astonished" by a pair of
moa skeletons from the
Canterbury Museum. More than 50 awards were collected by New Zealand exhibitors but, apparently, because of a problem of categorisation on the part of the jurors, the moa display was not among them.
Ottoman pavilion Osman Hamdi Bey, an archaeologist and painter, was chosen by the Ottoman government as commissary of the empire's exhibits in Vienna. He organized the Ottoman pavilion with
Victor Marie de Launay, a French-born Ottoman official and archivist, who had written the catalogue for the Ottoman Empire's exhibition at the
1867 Paris World's Fair. The Ottoman pavilion, located near the Egyptian pavilion (which had its own pavilion despite being a territory of the Ottoman Empire), in the park outside the Rotunde, included small replicas of notable Ottoman buildings and models of vernacular architecture: a replica of the
Fountain of Ahmed III at
Topkapı Palace, a model Istanbul residence, a representative
hamam, a cafe, and a bazaar. The 1873 Ottoman pavilion was more prominent than its pavilion in 1867. The Vienna exhibition set off Western nations' pavilions against Eastern pavilions, with the host, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, setting itself at the juncture between East and West.
Naser al-Din Shah Qajar visited 1873 Vienna Fair and Persian pavillion, in his first European journey and wrote about it extensively, in
his handwritten travelogue.
Russian pavilion The Russian pavilion had a naval section designed by
Viktor Hartmann. Exhibits included models of the
Port of Rijeka and the
Illés Relief model of Jerusalem. ==Gallery==