THE Palace Museum will extend its opening hours to the evening for the first time for two consecutive nights in celebration of this year’s Lantern Festival, museum curator Shan Jixiang said at an event in Beijing on Saturday.

The museum’s official website also announced it would host a “Lantern Festival night tour” cultural event today and tomorrow, and visitors were  told to make an appointment for the tour on Sunday and Monday respectively with the online ticket booking system.

After this announcement, tickets for today sold out within 10 minutes. Quite a few people have pinned their hopes on the second appointment. But at midnight the ticket booking system broke down, a result of too many people visiting the website at the same time.

“I was sitting in front of the computer around 11:45 p.m. to grab tickets, only to find the website melted down. When I managed to open the website, all the tickets sold out,” said Du Yue, a freelance photographer who wishes to record the night view of the Palace Museum.

The crash of the website has disappointed many visitors, yet it shows the appeal of the Palace Museum.

Also, “night tour of Palace Museum” has become one of the hottest topics on China’s Twitter-like platform Sina Weibo at present, attaining more than 330 million hits among the online users.

“I am a loyal fan of Chinese costume dramas and curious to see the night scenery of the Palace Museum. Could the night tour be extended more days to meet the public’s demand?” Sina Weibo user Xiao Hongshu456 asked on the official account of the Palace Museum.

“Palace Museum once again amazes me. Although I am not the lucky dog who gets a ticket, I will be excited to see many breathtaking photos from professional photographers,” added another Weibo user Man Xiaoqing.

Because the ancient buildings in Beijing are mainly made of wood, in recent years, according to the Beijing Daily, there have been no Lantern Festival events held in cultural protection sites. This year, the Palace Museum will break with “tradition.”

The event is the first time in the Palace Museum’s 94-year history that it will be open to the public for free at night, and the first time that the ancient buildings in the Forbidden City will be lit on a large scale at night.

The main locations open to the public will be the Meridian Gate exhibition hall, the Gate of Supreme Harmony, the East Wall and the Gate of Divine Might.

Also, the renowned painting “A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains” will be projected on the roof of the ancients building and decorated with red lanterns, giving visitors the feeling of “walking along the painting.”

People from all walks of life including model workers, couriers, sanitation workers, police, military officers and soliders will be invited to take part in the night tour as well.

It is worth noting the official announcement also gives publicity to the museum’s newly-opened Corner Tower Restaurant and Corner Tower Cafe, allowing visitors to enjoy some leisure time in the two spots before concluding their night tour.

In recent years, the Palace Museum has been one of the most “fashionable” ancient cultural relics sites in Beijing and even the whole country. From 2012 to 2018, the area open to the public within the Forbidden City increased from 30 percent to 80 percent, with more and more courtyards, exhibitions and cultural relics “meeting” the public.

And the “night fair” in the Lantern Festival is also a creative attempt by the museum. The Palace Museum hopes to display the profound connotation of excellent traditional culture at multiple levels through exhibitions and other ways, to display and interpret traditional culture in a way that is popular with people, and to interact with the audience. The number of visitors to the Palace Museum has increased by more than 70 percent year on year, Beijing Daily said.  (China Daily)