For the first time in its 94-year history, the Palace Museum within China’s famed Forbidden City in Beijing has been opened to the public to usher in the Chinese New Year and celebrate the Lantern Festival with a spectacular light show.
It’s also the first time that the museum buildings have been decorated with lights on a large scale. The Palace Museum extended its opening hours on 19 February and will do so again tonight to give a limited number of visitors access – in the past, only VIPs such as visiting heads of state were allowed into the Forbidden City at night.
Image credit: @storiesofbeijing / Instagram
‘Those who get in will see the palace walls illuminated by red lanterns – aiming to give visitors a feel of what it was like to usher in the new year in the royal court about 200 years ago’, stated China’s Xinhua news agency.
When it was first announced that 6,000 free tickets would be issued for the event (3,000 for 19 February and 3,000 for 20 February), people ‘jostled’ for tickets on the internet, crashing the ticket website.
The Forbidden City, with its fabled 9,999 rooms, was the former imperial palace, home to China’s emperors between 1420 and 1912 and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
It’s a popular tourist attraction visited by more than 14-million people every year and like many other famous landmarks, it is also at risk from overtourism. In 2014 China announced it would be limiting ticket numbers in much the same manner as Machu Pichu in Peru and other spots across the world have done recently to minimise the impacts made by visitors.
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