How to Book Forbidden City Tickets as a Foreigner
The 20:00 release, the passport format that breaks bookings, what to do when your date is sold out, and the two extra galleries most visitors miss.
The Forbidden City is the one attraction in China where a booking failure cannot be fixed on the day.
There is no walk-up queue in the ordinary sense, the daily visitor cap is enforced, and peak-season dates disappear within minutes of release. People arrive in Beijing having planned a trip around it, discover the date is gone, and end up looking at the outside of a wall.
This is the process, the timing, and what to do when it goes wrong.
The essentials
Release: seven days in advance, at around 20:00 Beijing time (UTC+8). Price: ¥60 from 1 April to 31 October, ¥40 from 1 November to 31 March. Closed: Mondays, except statutory public holidays. Booking: real-name, tied to your passport number. Entry: Meridian Gate (午门) only, at the south. No other entrance. Daily cap: enforced. Peak dates sell out.
Everything else is detail.
Work out your date first
Before you touch a booking system, sort out two things.
Is your intended day a Monday? If so, it will not work, and no amount of refreshing will change that. Move the Forbidden City to another day of your Beijing stay. This is the most common avoidable failure and it costs nothing to check.
What is the release time in your own time zone? Tickets go on sale seven days ahead at around 20:00 Beijing time. That is:
- 13:00 in London (BST) / 12:00 (GMT)
- 14:00 in Paris and Berlin (CEST)
- 08:00 in New York (EDT)
- 05:00 in Los Angeles (PDT)
- 22:00 in Sydney (AEST)
- 21:00 in Tokyo and Seoul
If you are flying to China on day one and visiting the Forbidden City on day three, you are booking from home before you leave. Set an alarm.
Booking, step by step
1. Get an account with a verified passport
The official ticketing system requires identity verification. For a foreign passport this means entering the passport number and, in most cases, confirming a mobile number and an email address.
Do this days in advance, not at 19:55 on release night. Verification is usually quick but it is not instant, and discovering an unverified account while your date sells out is a self-inflicted problem.
2. Enter the passport number exactly as printed
This is where most bookings break.
- Include every letter and digit, in order, with no spaces.
- Do not add your nationality code unless the field asks for it separately.
- Do not use a hyphen unless it is printed in the document.
- Use the passport you will actually carry on the day. If you hold two passports, the booked one is the one that must be scanned.
- Names must match the machine-readable zone of the passport, not the way you normally write your name.
A mismatch is not a warning at the gate. It is a refusal.
3. Book each person separately within the order
Every visitor is a named booking with their own document number, including children. A family of four is four passport numbers. There is no "plus three" option.
4. Choose the time slot
Entry is by slot, typically split into morning and afternoon bands. Morning slots go first and are worth having — the courtyards are hot, treeless and full by midday in summer.
5. Save the confirmation
Screenshot it. Save the booking reference. Beijing has patchy mobile data inside some of the palace complex and you do not want to be searching an inbox at the gate.
If your date is sold out
Options, in rough order of usefulness.
Check again the following morning. Cancellations and released inventory reappear. This is not reliable but it costs you nothing.
Move the day. If you have three days in Beijing, use one of the others. This is by far the best fix and it is why you should book the Forbidden City before you book anything else in Beijing.
Book through a licensed operator. Reputable travel agencies and platforms hold allocation and can often place a passport-holder onto a date that appears closed on the public system. Expect to pay a service fee above the ¥60 face value. This is legitimate; the attraction booking guide covers how to tell a real operator from a reseller.
The Donghua Gate question. Some foreign visitors report being able to buy same-day at the East Gate ticket window with a passport. This has worked for people and it depends on daily capacity, and it is not a documented guarantee. Treat it as a last resort on the morning, not as a plan you build a day around.
What not to do: buy from a street tout near Tiananmen, or from a website that appears in a search advert and charges several times face value. Both exist and both cause problems at the gate.
Getting in on the day
Bring the physical passport. Not a photocopy, not a photo on your phone. The same document you booked with.
Enter at the Meridian Gate, the south entrance. This is the only public entrance and it is a fifteen-minute walk from the nearest metro through Tiananmen Square.
Allow extra time for the square. Tiananmen Square itself has security screening and, at times, its own reservation requirement for entry. Check the current position before you go — the arrangements have changed and are separate from the Forbidden City booking. Budget 30 to 45 minutes between leaving the metro and reaching the Meridian Gate.
Security screening at the gate covers bags. Prohibited items include large bags, tripods, drones, and lighters. There is limited storage.
Arrive at the start of your slot, not the end. Late arrivals within the slot are usually admitted, but do not test it.
The two extra galleries
Your ¥60 or ¥40 ticket covers the main axis and the outer courts. Two of the best parts of the museum are separate.
The Treasure Gallery (珍宝馆) in the northeastern palaces holds imperial jade, gold, cloisonné and ceremonial objects, and includes the Nine Dragon Screen and the Opera House. Separate admission, generally modest.
The Clock and Watch Gallery (钟表馆) holds the Qing imperial collection of European and Chinese mechanical clocks — several hundred pieces, many of them absurd, some of them demonstrated in operation at scheduled times. Separate admission.
Both are quieter than the main axis because most visitors do not know they exist. If you have three hours and you like objects rather than architecture, the Clock Gallery is the best forty minutes in the complex.
Book them at the same time as your main ticket if the system allows; some periods require them to be added at the gallery entrance.
How to actually walk it
The default route is south to north along the central axis: Meridian Gate, the three great halls, the inner court, the Imperial Garden, out at the Gate of Divine Prowess.
That is about a kilometre in a straight line and three to four kilometres with detours, over uneven stone, with almost no shade. Allow three hours minimum. Four if you are doing the galleries.
Three things that improve the visit:
Go at the start of the morning slot. The central axis is a funnel and by 11:00 it is a slow-moving queue between two walls.
Get off the axis. The eastern and western palace courtyards are where the museum collections are and where the crowds are not. Most visitors walk the middle and leave.
Climb Jingshan afterwards. Directly across the road from the north gate is Jingshan Park, and a fifteen-minute climb puts you above the entire complex looking south over the roofs. It costs a few yuan. This is the view that makes the scale comprehensible, and it is the thing visitors most often skip and later regret.
Do not plan anything demanding for the afternoon. Between Tiananmen, the palace and Jingshan you will have walked a long way.
What you are actually looking at
The site rewards ten minutes of orientation, because the English signage tells you what each building is called and not what it was for.
It is a diagram, not a palace. The whole complex is laid out on a north–south axis with everything mirrored east and west, because the arrangement is a statement about cosmic and political order rather than an architectural preference. The emperor sat at the centre facing south. Everything else is positioned relative to that.
The Outer Court, the southern third, is the ceremonial half — the three great halls on their marble terraces, used for coronations, imperial birthdays and the announcement of examination results. Nobody lived here. The scale is deliberately intimidating and the buildings are largely empty.
The Inner Court, north of the Gate of Heavenly Purity, is where the imperial household actually lived. Smaller buildings, closer together, and the courtyards where the day-to-day politics happened. This is the more interesting half and it is the half most visitors are too tired to look at properly.
The side palaces, east and west of the axis, held the consorts, the workshops, the treasuries and the archives. They now hold the museum collections — ceramics, paintings, bronzes, furniture, clocks. Almost everyone walks the middle and leaves.
The numbers are not decorative. Nine and five recur throughout — nine studs across a gate, nine dragons on a screen — because they were reserved for imperial use. So was the yellow roof tile. A building's rank is legible from its roof: the number of ridge figures on the eaves corresponds directly to its importance, and the Hall of Supreme Harmony has the only set of ten in China.
Knowing that last one changes how the complex reads. You can rank every building you pass by counting the small animals on the corner of its roof.
Practical notes
Opening hours run roughly 08:30 to 17:00 in peak season and 08:30 to 16:30 off-peak, with last entry earlier than closing. Check for your date.
Toilets exist throughout and are variable. Carry tissues.
Food inside is limited and expensive. Eat before or after.
Guides. Audio guides in several languages are available at the gate, and licensed human guides wait outside. The audio guide is genuinely good and location-aware. If you want context rather than a route, it is worth the fee — the site has minimal English signage for individual buildings.
Photography is permitted outside. Interiors are generally viewed through doorways rather than entered, and some galleries restrict photography.
Weather. There is no shelter on the central axis. In July and August the stone courtyards are brutally hot; in December and January the wind through them is severe. Dress for a day outdoors.
Official sources
- Palace Museum official ticketing: https://gugong.ktmtech.cn/
- Palace Museum English site: https://en.dpm.org.cn/
Prices, release timing, opening hours, gallery arrangements and Tiananmen Square access rules all change. Confirm on the official channel for your date.
Last reviewed: 30 July 2026.