Can You Actually Visit the Forbidden City? (Yes, Here's How)
Yes, you can visit the Forbidden City, and no special permission is required beyond a ticket. Here's exactly how the real-name booking system works and where people get stuck.
Yes. The Forbidden City has been a fully public museum since 1925, open to any ticketed visitor, including international tourists, every day except Mondays (statutory holidays excepted). The only real obstacle is the booking process: tickets are e-ticket only, tied to your passport through a real-name reservation system, with no walk-up sales at the gate.
Yes, it's genuinely open to the public
Any confusion about whether tourists are allowed inside is understandable given the name, but it's outdated by exactly a century. The palace stopped being a sealed imperial residence in 1925, when it reopened as the Palace Museum shortly after Puyi's 1924 expulsion, and it has operated as a public museum ever since. Today it's one of the most visited museums on earth, drawing a daily cap of roughly 80,000 visitors, foreign tourists very much included. There's no special permission, visa category or local sponsor required beyond the same tourist visa that gets you into China in the first place.
When it's open, and when it's closed
The Forbidden City runs on a seasonal schedule. From April 1 to October 31, it's open 8:30am to 5:00pm, with last admission at 4:00pm. From November 1 to March 31, hours shrink slightly to 8:30am to 4:30pm, with last admission at 3:30pm. The one fixed closure is Mondays, when the museum shuts for maintenance, except on statutory public holidays, when it stays open. Our guide to the best time to visit covers how those hours interact with weather and crowd levels across the year.
The actual friction: how tickets work
The access itself isn't the hard part, the booking system is. The Palace Museum sells tickets exclusively as e-tickets, and there is no paper ticket booth and no walk-up purchase at the gate, a policy that catches a lot of first-time visitors off guard. Every ticket is tied to a single passport or ID number through a real-name reservation system, so the person named on the booking is the person who has to show up and walk through the checkpoint. Tickets release at 20:00 Beijing time, exactly seven days ahead of the visit date, through the museum's own website or its WeChat mini-program, both of which run primarily in Chinese. For travelers without a Chinese phone number, a WeChat account set up for the mini-program, or fluent Chinese, that release window is a genuine obstacle, and popular dates can sell out within it. Our full tickets and booking guide walks through the official process step by step, including current pricing.
What to bring on the day
Because the whole system runs on a real-name reservation, the physical passport used to book the ticket is the one document that actually matters at the gate. A photo of the passport or a scanned copy on your phone is not a substitute; the checkpoint needs the real thing in hand to match against the reservation. Beyond that, the rules are ordinary museum sense: dress respectfully and wear proper footwear, since it's a lot of walking on uneven stone. No flash photography is allowed inside the halls, tripods are generally not permitted, and drones are strictly forbidden. Large wheeled luggage and scooters aren't allowed either, so this isn't a stop to make with your suitcases straight from the airport.
If Tiananmen Square is part of your plan, note that it requires a separate real-name reservation from the Forbidden City ticket, with its own passport check at a different checkpoint. The two sites sit right next to each other, roughly a ten-minute walk from the square's center to the palace gate, but they are two separate bookings and two separate security lines, not one combined pass.
Where visitors actually get stuck
| Friction point | Why it trips people up |
|---|---|
| Chinese-language booking portal | The official site and WeChat mini-program run primarily in Chinese |
| Real-name ID requirement | Each ticket is locked to one passport number, no transfers between people |
| No walk-up sales | Arriving without a pre-booked e-ticket means no entry, regardless of the queue |
| 7-day release window | Tickets for popular dates can sell out fast once the 20:00 release hits |
The simplest workaround: book a guided tour
None of that friction is a reason to skip the palace, it's just a reason to book a tour that includes the ticket. A guided tour that includes tickets secures your entry through channels built for exactly this problem, so you show up at the meeting point instead of racing a Chinese-language ticket release at 20:00 seven nights before your visit. Our Forbidden City tour with tickets included handles the reservation for you across a full day inside the complex, and if you'd rather move at your own pace, the private walking tour with seven flexible route options pairs a guaranteed ticket with a route built around what you actually want to see. For a tighter schedule, the 4-hour small-group tour covers the essentials without eating a full day. Either way, you're inside the same real, fully public palace, minus the part where you're fighting a foreign-language booking system.
If you're weighing whether the visit is worth the effort at all, that's a separate question from access, and our honest review of visiting the Forbidden City tackles it directly. But on the narrower question of whether you, specifically, are allowed to walk through those gates: yes, unambiguously, provided you have a ticket in hand and it isn't a Monday. For the current official rules straight from the source, the Palace Museum's own English site and Beijing's official government tourism portal are the two places to check before you go.
