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CHINA-FORBIDDEN CITY-OPEN
Forbidden City to open more areas to public: report
BEIJING, Dec. 21, 2018 (BSS/XINHUA) – The Palace Museum, or the former
imperial palace in downtown Beijing, will open 85 percent of its areas to the
public, compared with the current 80 percent, the China Daily reported
Friday.
Most of the areas inside the museum, also known as the Forbidden City, will
no longer be off-limits for the public, the newspaper quoted Shan Jixiang,
the museum’s curator, as saying.
The biggest of its kind in the world, the Forbidden City is gradually
opening more of its coverage of 720,000 square meters to visitors in recent
years. Only 30 percent of its areas were accessible by the public in 2012.
Some rooms that had not ben opened for decades were used as “lockers” that
were strewn with items ranging from construction materials to daily
necessities from imperial times, said the report.
In recent years, many of these rooms have been renovated and transformed
into exhibition halls.
To ease the crowds at the museum, a cap on visitor numbers was set in June
2015, allowing 80,000 people a day to enter it. Visitors were also encouraged
to buy tickets in advance online.
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