Forbidden City Tickets Only to Be Sold Online Beginning October
The Forbidden City without massive queues for tickets? That’s the plan as Palace Museum administration announced this week that all ticket sales will be moved online effective as of October.
Visitors to the UNESCO World Heritage site will be able to reserve their tickets in advance and enter through an as yet unspecified scheme involving scans using visitors’ mobile devices.
While the walk-up ticket windows will be closing, special “service windows” will remain open for guests who don’t have a mobile phone, aren’t sure how to pay online, or who think the Internet is a tool of Western Imperialist aggression. Extra gates and security checkpoints will also be opened to handle the new system.
READ: Visitors to Beijing Palace Museum Topped 16 Million in 2016, An Average of 40,000 Every Day
In 2013, the Palace Museum administration announced a series of new policies to control access to the Forbidden City, citing the need to protect the nearly 600-year-old palace, including a limit of 80,000 tickets sold each day. While 80,000 is about the size of a good-sized football crowd, it represented a significant improvement from the years leading up to the cap when peak days might see 120,000 or more tourists pour through the gates of the palace.
This week’s announcement would mark another major change in access to the historical site, although it was not immediately clear exactly how the system would work.
Online ticket sales began in 2011, but currently the system is only in Chinese and payment options are limited to Chinese bank cards and Alipay making the service limiting its usefulness for overseas visitors. In recent years, it has become common for international tourists to be turned away from the gates of Beijing’s most famous city landmark after they learned that all tickets for the day had already sold out.
Director of the Palace Museum Shan Jixiang told China Radio International that, “The museum will work with online booking platforms and mobile apps, as well as digital payment channels such as Alipay and WeChat Wallet and the online payment system will have English and other language versions to assist foreign visitors.”
The new plan then would seem to represent a much-needed update to the current online purchasing system although the devil no doubt rests in the digital details.
READ: 6 Hacks for Visiting (and Actually Enjoying) the Forbidden City
The Forbidden City is also undergoing major renovations as the Palace Museum continues in its ambitions plan to completely renovate and open over 90 percent of the palace to visitors by 2025, the centennial of the Palace Museum first opening to the public. The museum has also been aggressively pursuing other revenue streams, earning more than 1 billion RMB (USD 145 million) a year from merchandising and offering secret recipes from the imperial kitchens for sale on Alibaba's T-Mall, the Alibaba-owned South China Morning Post reported last week.
Jeremiah Jenne is a writer, educator, and historian based in Beijing since 2002. His writings on Chinese history and culture can be found at the website Jottings from the Granite Studio and he is also the founder of Beijing by Foot, which offers educational programs and historic walks in and around Beijing.
Photo: yibada.com
