Abstract:Louis Masson-Détourbet, a young French architect who graduated from the Ecole des BeauxArts in Paris, designed the Chinese pavilion at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. While he used the typical BeauxArts drawing and design methods, he drew inspiration from modern photographs of traditional architecture built in the official style of northern China. The crosscultural encounter took place before the pioneers in this field, such as Beaux-Arts architect Paul Cret or the Chinese architectural historian Liang Sicheng, worked and studied in the United States. This pavilion thus serves as an example for the increasing globalization and modernization at the time and the new ways of viewing, studying, and (re) producing traditional Chinese architecture outside of China. In detail, the article discuses Masson-Détourbet’s drawings of the pavilion against the historical and political background of the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, while exploring Beaux-Arts eclecticism in nineteenth-century Paris and the modern history of photography in China. This will reveal the pavilion’s design methodology, eclectic reference corpus, and composition principle. Additionally, it will place the pavilion’s design in a context of Western reshaping of Chinese architecture.