Palace opens up 'women's world'

Imperial Palace. [Photo/Xinhua]

China's Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, will open its west wings, once the home of the imperial harem, to the public for the first time ever by 2020.

Curator Shan Jixiang said that the opening would be in honor of the palace's 600th anniversary in 2020, and it will also renovate a never-finished Western-style "Hall of Water" into a hall for foreign cultural relics, the first such in China, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Shan said at a seminar in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province on Sunday that the renovation work has gone on for 11 years and the next part of the work involves installing security devices, service devices and display equipment.

"The western part of the palace was also called the women's world, since the empresses, emperors' wives and concubines lived there. It has never been open to the public in the 88 years since the museum was established," said Shan.

A staff worker, Li Bin, confirmed to the Global Times on Monday that the museum has a plan for a long time to open the western part.

When renovation work is finished by 2020 and the western part opens to the public, some 76 percent of the total area of the Forbidden City will be available for visitors, in comparison to 52 percent now and only 30 percent a decade ago, Shan said.

The "Hall of Water," also known as the "Crystal Palace," started construction in 1909 in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and was suspended in 1911.

The enlarged open area will be a boon for visitors, said Shen Wangshu, deputy director of the Institute of Capital Cultural Development at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences.

"Right now, only important relics are on display. Under the current rotating system of relics on display, the whole collection might not be seen over a lifetime," Shen told the Global Times.

However, he also pointed out that most visitors, especially in tour groups, often walk only through the central part of the palace from south to north, missing a lot of treasures on display on the eastern and western flanks.

"The visitors only see where the emperors sat, where they slept and the imperial gardens, and then they go out," curator Shan also said, adding that there are about 41 exhibitions by the two sides of the central route, and some 9,000 pieces of relics are on display daily.