Foreign diplomats and representatives of international organizations visit the exhibition. [Photo by WANG ZHUANGFEI/CHINA DAILY]

Yang adds: "Chairman Mao was actually hoping and calling on people to work on it. In July 1954, the first plane made in China successfully completed its trial flight."

Seventy narrators from across the country tell visitors about the exhibition a dozen times each day. The narrators gathered in Beijing on Aug 14 and went through training for more than a month before the exhibition began. Other than physical and mental well-being, the training focused on pronunciation, intonation and makeup.

One narrator is Xiao Mengya, who works at a Guangzhou museum in Guangdong province. She is responsible for guiding visitors through the last two sections of the exhibition, and her narration includes more than 10,000 words, she says.

"We cannot make any mistakes. We have to learn all the stories behind the words to understand the narration," Xiao says.

She adds that she was overcome with emotion when a group of overseas Chinese visitors at the exhibition repeated a sentence from Xiao's narration: "My country and I cannot separate."