Tickets go on sale for Hong Kong Palace Museum

Ticket sales for the Hong Kong Palace Museum kicked off on Tuesday, roughly two weeks before the venue is set to open.

According to Chinese online travel-service platform Fliggy, tickets from July 2, the day the museum is set to open with a ceremonial exhibition, to July 31 are now available online.

On Fliggy, standard tickets are selling for HK$50 ($6.50) for exhibitions from hall one to hall seven, whereas tickets for special exhibitions, allowing the visit for all nine exhibition halls, are HK$120 ($15) for adults and half that for children aged 7 to 11 and the elderly over 65 years old, and people with special needs.

The tickets can also be purchased through the Hong Kong Palace Museum website and the West Kowloon district website, as well as online platforms Klook and the China Travel Service.

A Hong Kong citizen surnamed Chen told the Global Times that he tried to buy tickets at 10:00 in the morning only to find that a total of 1,628 people ahead of him waiting in line for the website. It took him over an hour to finally get the tickets.

Over 900 artworks and cultural relics from the Palace Museum in Beijing are on loan to the Hong Kong branch to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the city's return to China. Many of these relics will be exhibited in Hong Kong for the first time.

Representatives from the Palace Museum in Beijing noted at a press conference last week that the exhibition is also the largest loan the Palace Museum has made to another institution since its establishment in 1925.

After signing a cooperative contract with the Palace Museum, the Hong Kong Palace Museum was completed after almost three years of construction.

According to the Xinhua News Agency, the Hong Kong Palace Museum is seven stories high across 13,000 square meters of floor space. The building's beige gold embellished with dark red and cool gray echoes the colors of the Forbidden City, where the Palace Museum is located.

To protect the fragile relics on loan, they will be displayed for a limited time at the Hong Kong Palace Museum, from one month to a year depending on the object.

For example, due to the delicate nature of the books and paintings, which can easily be damaged by humidity and long exposure to light, they will only be put on display for one to three months, after which they will be returned to Beijing.