Hong Kong franchise of Beijing’s Palace Museum to host about 160 ‘national treasures’ from mainland attraction
- Director estimates 5,000 daily visitors to the Hong Kong Palace Museum when it opens in mid-2022, a project he assures will keep within its budget
- City leader Carrie Lam says local museum will be ‘new platform for promoting Chinese culture internationally’
The Hong Kong version of Beijing’s Palace Museum will showcase about 800 exhibits from the mainland Chinese attraction, of which a fifth are regarded “national treasures”, its chief has revealed while offering assurances that the project will not overrun its budget.
Louis Ng Chi-wa, the Hong Kong Palace Museum director, said on Wednesday that when the venue opened in mid-2022 he expected about 5,000 people each day to visit its exhibitions of porcelain, paintings, calligraphy and other artefacts, amounting to an annual flow of between 1.5 million and 2 million people.
Marking the completion of the museum’s building structure, Ng predicted his team would take control of the site in the West Kowloon Cultural District in or around the third quarter of next year, provided other works ran smoothly. It would then be in a position to receive the relics in phases over the Lunar New Year period in 2022.
“Among the 800 relics, about 20 per cent of them are listed as ‘grade-one relics’. We generally call them ‘national treasure’ grade. Most of them will be showcased for the first time in Hong Kong,” Ng said, without disclosing the specific items.
In 2016, the city signed a HK$3.5 billion (US$451 million) deal with Beijing to create a replica of the capital’s celebrated Palace Museum at the 40-hectare district on the Victoria Harbour waterfront. The district is designed to make Hong Kong one of the world’s leading cultural destinations.
The museum will host nine exhibition galleries celebrating the culture of the original palace, ranging from its architecture and the works of art displayed there, to the royal lifestyle of the Qing dynasty.
