Chinese museums impose strict rules as visitors flock to blockbuster art exhibitions
Once a place for tour guides to take groups on rainy days, record numbers are joining the queues thanks to social media promotion and more funding
Like many people at the Palace Museum in Beijing’s Forbidden City last week, Gao Junxuan made a special trip to see a painting she had long admired but never had the chance to view in person.
She travelled from the city of Rizhao, in southeastern Shandong province, making sure she was outside the museum early, before it opened. Gao waited for three hours before she finally laid eyes on the 11.9-metre scroll painting – and she said it was well worth the effort.
The only surviving work of Song dynasty (960-1279) painter Wang Ximeng, A Panorama of Rivers and Mountains is one of China’s best known blue and green landscape paintings.
It has been on public display just three times before and is being shown in its entirety for the first time at the exhibition, which runs until December 14, along with 85 other blue-green landscape paintings.
Gao said she was immediately struck by the incredible brightness of the colours highlighting the mountains and water.
But she did not have long to meditate on the masterpiece – it is so popular that visitors are given just five minutes to enjoy it before they are ushered along.
