New | The Forbidden City’s treasures for the masses, at their finger tips

The Palace Museum wants not only to sell cultural heritage, but also merchandise inspired by the imperial past that Chinese consumers have a thirst for

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The number of visitors to the Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, in Beijing in 2016 hit 16 million, more than double the population of Hong Kong. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 9:03pm, 7 May 2017Updated: 10:56pm, 7 May 2017

At China’s five century old Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing, 16 million visitors a year navigate through its numerous halls and pavilions with red walls and yellow-glazed roof tiles perched on white marble terraces.

Museum officials are hopeful that the visitors take away with them a grasp of the aesthetics of Chinese ancient architecture and the brilliance of the artisans, as well as be persuaded by the “soft power” of a country with 5,000 years of civilization.

China’s breakneck economic growth pace over the past 30 years has opened up a vast new opportunity to commercialise its heritage, allowing the museum to make a bucket out of the country’s most hallowed cultural heritage. A vast array of merchandising is on display, from notebooks featuring the 12 gorgeous concubines of the Qing Emperor Yongzheng to earphones resembling Empress Dowager Cixi’s Buddhist prayer beads.

The largest palace on the planet has raised its retail game and turned it into a proliferating commercial hub, raking in more than 1 billion yuan(US$145 million) a year from merchandising and retailing alone.

The Palace Museum last week took a step further. It put the imperial court’s secret recipe choices up for sale on Alibaba Group Holdings’ online marketplace Tmall.

They included Cixi’s favourite black sugar ginger tea concoction and sticky date pancakes, handmade by a few select Beijing bakeries that were rumoured to have fed the gourmet-obsessed Chinese monarchs centuries ago.

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