The eagerly awaited Hong Kong Palace Museum eventually opened on July 3 in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District after a laborious five years of construction.
The museum joins other well-known sites along the Victoria Harbour Waterfront, including the soon-to-open M+ and other facilities. M+ is Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture. It opened on November 12.
More than 900 precious objects on loan from the original Palace Museum in Beijing are housed in the museum, whose construction cost US$ 450 million. 13 works of art that were loaned from the Louvre are also on display in the Hong Kong Palace Museum.
Visitors can anticipate seeing a variety of obscure treasures that have never before been seen by the general public. The Beijing institution’s loan of the Hong Kong exhibition, which features pottery, jade, bronze, costumes, jewellery, paintings, calligraphy, and other national treasures, is the largest since the museum there was established in 1925.
Despite the connection between the museums in Hong Kong and Beijing, the Hong Kong Palace Museum is making an effort to forge its own identity by using multimedia creations from six local artists in its opening ceremony. With more than 115,000 tickets sold for the month of July alone, the museum has already established itself as a well-liked attraction within its first month of operation.
Dane Cheng, executive director of the Hong Kong Tourism Board, said, “We hope this world-class museum will generate even greater interest for Hong Kong as an arts and culture destination and reinforce the city’s status as a focus for worldwide cultural exchange.”