Palace Museum to host livestream tour

After closing its doors to public visits for over 70 days due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the Palace Museum in Beijing, also known as the Forbidden City, announced on Friday it will host a two-day online live streaming tour, starting April 5.

The Palace Museum was China's imperial palace from 1420 to 1911. Covering 720,000 square meters, it is the world's largest surviving palatial compound. This year marks the 600th anniversary of the founding of the Forbidden City.

According to the schedule, livestreaming anchors from the museum will guide a 2-hour tour "on the cloud" on Sunday morning, visiting the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the highest-level architecture in the palatial complex used for the most important rituals during imperial years, and the Palace of Compassion and Tranquility, a former residence of some empress dowagers, and its garden, now bathed in flourishing blossoms.

On Sunday afternoon, the online tour will start from the western gate of the museum, going through several major galleries displaying cultural relics and end by the eastern gate. A major exhibition on key Tibetan cultural relics, which opened in December but is now halted by the closure, will be a highlight of the tour.

Netizens will be ushered around several key palaces along the axis of the Forbidden City and in the eastern part of the compound on Monday morning.

Online platforms broadcasting this on live tour include Xinhuanet, m.people.cn, short-video platform Tik Tok, Tencent and others.

The Palace Museum closed its doors on Jan 25, or the day of Spring Festival, as an emergency measure to contain the virus. Visits to the museum, where 1.86 million cultural relics are housed, surpassed 19 million in 2019.