No reservations about new Forbidden City ticket policy

Tourists may have to put their names on a long list in the future for a peek into the Forbidden City, an imperial palace-turned-museum packed with visitors, its curator Shan Jixiang told the press yesterday.

Imposing a system that requires tourists to reserve tickets is the best answer to the problem of overcrowding, which poses dangers to the museum buildings at peak times, said Shan.

He became the chief manager of the Forbidden City, officially known as the Palace Museum, on January 15, after a string of scandals last year reduced the museum's credibility to a historical low.

More than 14 million visitors toured the Forbidden City last year, the Guangzhou Daily reported yesterday. The museum's highest single-day traffic reached 148,000 visitors.

Preliminary work is underway to help the museum decide how many people to let in at any one time. The museum launched its first online ticketing service in September last year.

"We're building a monitoring system to track real-time tourist traffic. Data coming out of this system will help us make decisions," Shan told the Global Times yesterday via e-mail.

"I'm certain the museum will have to handle over 15 million tourists this year, and that number will continue to grow," Shan was quoted as saying yesterday by newspaper Beijing Business Today.

Large crowds mean crushing hazards and may encourage anti-social behavior, according to Tsinghua University architect, Li Luke.

"The imperial palace was not built to handle airport-style crowds. There are narrow spaces like gateways where you can count on having congestion," Li told the Global Times, "The danger is more to the people than to the buildings."

It also makes it harder to manage littering, she noted.

Only 45 percent of the 720,000-square-meter architectural complex is open to visitors, and a large trove of treasures is still locked away from the public.

Shan has promised to open up more of the 592-year-old palace.

This will mean evicting many institutions affiliated to the museum that currently possess spaces and ancient houses inside the Forbidden City, Shan said.