‘Brothers’: Hong Kong and Beijing palace museums reflect on special ties

As the Beijing Palace Museum celebrates its 100th anniversary, a growing level of exchanges is taking place between the two institutions

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Louis Ng (left), director of the Hong Kong Palace Museum, and Lou Wei, executive deputy director of the Beijing Palace Museum, are photographed at The Palace of Established Happiness inside The Forbidden City in Beijing, China on August 19, 2025. Photo: Enid Tsui

Published: 7:15am, 26 Aug 2025

On August 19, a declaration of fraternal love gushed forth in the same spot where Presidents Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and their wives had a private dinner in 2017, deep in the heart of Beijing’s Forbidden City.

Enshrouded within the serenity of Jianfu Palace, or the Palace of Established Happiness, the directors of Beijing’s Palace Museum and the Hong Kong Palace Museum (HKPM) said that the two institutions were like “brothers” and dropped hints of new loans that would arrive in Hong Kong in 2026.

The Hong Kong museum is run independently from its Beijing “big brother”, but the ties between them are well known.

In 2016, then Hong Kong Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor announced without any public consultation that the city’s West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD) was to build a Hong Kong Palace Museum, a plan initiated by the Palace Museum in Beijing and funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC).

The Beijing Palace Museum (left) in the Forbidden City. Photo: Xinhua

Now, as Beijing’s Palace Museum celebrates its 100th anniversary, the three-year-old HKPM is thriving thanks to mainland China’s support, said its director, Louis Ng Chi-wa, in Beijing.

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100 years of the Palace Museum

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