The complete Forbidden City guide
I have been a licensed guide in Beijing for nine years and I live ten minutes from the east moat. In that time the palace itself has barely changed and the way you get into it has changed completely. This page is the plan I give friends: what to do a week out, what to do the night before, what to do at the gate, and what the three hours inside actually consist of.
Seven days out: the only deadline that matters
The Palace Museum releases each day’s tickets exactly one week before, at around 8 PM Beijing time, through the official WeChat Mini Program or through dpm.org.cn. There is no earlier release, no waiting list, and since 2026 there is no counter at the gate that can help you. When the 80,000 places for that date are gone, that date is gone.
Two things follow from that, and they are the two things I watch people get wrong.
The first is the time zone. Beijing is a single time zone for the whole country, eight hours ahead of UTC. If you are booking from New York, the window opens at 8 AM your time; from London, at 1 PM. I have met visitors who set an alarm for 8 PM at home and woke up to find the day sold out before they had breakfast.
The second is the passport. Booking is real-name: the passport number you enter is checked against the passport you carry, and it is one booking per passport per day. A married couple need two bookings with two numbers. A transposed digit is not something the staff at Wumen can override.
If your dates are a summer weekend or fall inside a national holiday, treat the 8 PM release as a fixed appointment rather than something to get to later that evening. Peak dates clear in minutes, not hours. Outside July, August and the holiday weeks, you usually have the evening.
Or: let the tour hold the ticket
This is the part of the trip where a booked tour earns its money, and I would rather say that plainly than dress it up. On every guided option here the admission ticket is included in the price — the operator holds an allocation and books in your name, so you are not sitting up for the release window and you are not exposed to a sold-out date. It is not a queue-jump and it is not a secret entrance. It is somebody else absorbing the one genuinely awkward piece of administration in a Beijing itinerary.
The trade-off is that you are then on their clock. If you would rather keep your own hours and you are confident with the official app, book it yourself and spend the money on the Treasure Gallery instead. I have written the honest version of that decision on whether you need a guide, and the full price ladder is on what tours cost.
Most bookedForbidden City Tour (Group or Private) with Tickets Included
Square + palaceTiananmen Square and Forbidden City Tour with Tickets
Lowest priceForbidden City Guided Tour with Entry Ticket, Tiananmen Optional
The night before
Four things, and they take about ten minutes.
- Check the day. The palace is closed on Mondays, except when a Monday falls inside a national holiday period. This catches people who planned around a Sunday arrival.
- Check the hours for the season. April to October the palace runs 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM with last entry at 4:00 PM. November to March it runs 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM with last entry at 3:30 PM. Last entry is enforced at the gate, not at your convenience. Details are on opening hours.
- Put the passport in the bag you are actually taking. Not the hotel safe. It is your ticket, and it is checked at the Meridian Gate and again, separately, if you are crossing Tiananmen Square first.
- Decide the gate order. If you want Tiananmen Square as well, do the square first and the palace second — the square has its own security check and its own ID scan, and it sits directly south of your entrance anyway.
Getting there on the morning
Metro Line 1 to Tiananmen East or Tiananmen West is the reliable option. Both stations put you on Chang’an Avenue a short walk from the square, and from the square you walk north to the Meridian Gate. Taxis cannot drop you at the entrance — the whole approach is pedestrianised and closed to traffic, so a taxi leaves you with the same walk plus a worse starting point. There is more detail, including the exit-side transport, on getting there.
The thing to internalise about arrival is that the entrance and the exit are not the same place and are not near each other. You enter at Wumen in the south and you leave at Shenwumen in the north, about a kilometre apart, and the flow inside is one-way. Whatever you leave at the south end — a hotel, a friend, a booked lunch — you will be walking a kilometre around the outside of the moat to get back to. Plan the afternoon from the north gate.
Morning entry is cooler and the light on the roofs is better, but the first hour after opening is also the densest. If you have the choice and you are not on a tour clock, entering around 1 PM in the low season gives you thinner crowds and still leaves enough time before the 3:30 PM last entry closes behind you.
What the three hours inside consist of
Three hours is the honest minimum for the central axis at a walking pace with stops. It is not a padded figure. The complex covers about 72 hectares and roughly 8,700 rooms, and the single route from gate to gate is a kilometre of it.
You pass, in this order: the Meridian Gate, the Gate of Supreme Harmony across the bridged inner stream, the three great ceremonial halls, the smaller and more domestic Inner Court, the Imperial Garden, and then out through the Gate of Divine Might. The full stop-by-stop version, with the distances, is on the map and route page.
Two things surprise first-time visitors and both are worth knowing before you are standing in it.
The first is that you do not go inside the great halls. You look into them from the doorways and from the terraces. The throne rooms are viewed, not entered. This is not a restriction that a tour or a more expensive ticket lifts.
The second is how little the signage tells you. It is bilingual, Chinese and English, and it is largely names and dates. It will tell you that a building is the Hall of Preserving Harmony and when it was rebuilt. It will not tell you what happened in it, why the roof figurines are counted the way they are, or how to read the rank of a building from its proportions. That gap is the whole argument for having somebody with you, and it is a bigger gap than the language barrier people expect.
The two galleries, and whether to add them
The Treasure Gallery and the Clock Gallery each cost ¥10 on top of admission and each sit off the main axis. They are the best objects in the complex — the halls are architecture, the galleries are things — and they are also the first casualty of a tight schedule. Budget 45 minutes to an hour for each, and add that to your three, not into it. The fuller case for both is on the two extra galleries.
What to bring, and what not to worry about
Worth carrying
- Your passport — it is the ticket, and it is scanned
- Water. There is very little shade on the axis and the courtyards are stone
- Shoes you can walk a kilometre on marble in
- A hat in summer; Beijing hits the mid-thirties Celsius in July
- A charged phone, since the booking lives in it
Not worth worrying about
- A dress code — there is not one. Shorts are fine
- A printed ticket. The passport is the ticket
- Large bags or tripods, which slow you at security
- A picnic. Food inside is limited and the good options are outside
- Any expectation of doubling back through the exit
The specifics are broken out on what to wear and food and water inside.
Afterwards: the twenty minutes that make the photograph
Come out of Shenwumen, cross the road, and Jingshan Park is directly in front of you. The hill was built from the earth dug out of the moat, and from the pavilion at the top you look straight back down the axis you have just walked, with the whole golden roofscape laid out below. It is the view that is in every photograph of the Forbidden City taken from above, and almost nobody plans for it.
The climb is fifteen minutes at an unhurried pace. If you do one thing on this page, do this one. More on the view from the hill.
The mistakes I see most
- Booking at 8 PM local time instead of 8 PM Beijing time. By far the most common, and completely unrecoverable on the day.
- Arriving on a Monday. Closed, except during national holidays.
- Booking one ticket for two people. Real-name means one passport, one place.
- Arranging to meet somebody back at the south gate. The route does not let you.
- Allowing ninety minutes. You will walk it, but you will have seen a corridor rather than a palace.
- Assuming Tiananmen Square is inside. It is not, and it is a separate check. See Palace Museum or Forbidden City for the other naming confusion that trips people up.
Booking a tour, if that is the way you want to do it
Seven options are compared side by side on all tours, with independent write-ups of each on reviews. If you want the short version: the group-or-private guided tour is the one most people book, it includes the ticket, and it runs in English and Chinese.
Frequently asked questions
How far in advance can I book the Forbidden City?
Exactly seven days, no earlier. The Palace Museum releases each date’s tickets one week ahead at around 8 PM Beijing time and caps the day at 80,000 visitors. A tour that includes admission is the way around that window, because the operator holds the allocation.
Can I buy a ticket at the gate?
No. From 2026 the Palace Museum sells nothing at the gate. Booking is online only, through the official WeChat Mini Program or dpm.org.cn, and it is tied to your passport number.
How long do I need inside the Forbidden City?
Three hours is the honest minimum for the central axis at a normal pace. Add 45 minutes to an hour for each of the Treasure Gallery and the Clock Gallery, and about an hour more if you want the side palaces and the Imperial Garden properly.
Which gate do I enter and leave by?
You enter at the Meridian Gate (Wumen) in the south and leave by the Gate of Divine Might (Shenwumen) in the north. The flow is one-way and the two gates are about a kilometre apart, so plan your afternoon from the north side.
Is the Forbidden City closed on Mondays?
Yes, except when the Monday falls inside a national holiday period. Hours are 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM April to October, with last entry at 4:00 PM, and 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM November to March, with last entry at 3:30 PM.
Do I need a guide, or can I do it alone?
You can do it alone, and if you read Mandarin or you are comfortable with the official booking app there is a real case for it. The signage inside is bilingual but thin — names and dates rather than context — so what a guide mainly buys you is an explanation of what you are looking at.