How to Buy Forbidden City Tickets as a Foreigner (Passport Booking Guide)

Quick answer: Forbidden City tickets cost ¥60 (April 1–Oct 31) or ¥40 (Nov 1–Mar 31), released exactly 7 days before your visit at 20:00 Beijing time. Foreign visitors book with a passport number via ticket.dpm.org.cn or the official WeChat mini-program. No same-day tickets exist, the museum closes Mondays, and you enter through the Meridian Gate (south) with the original passport you booked with.

If you are planning a first trip to Beijing, the Forbidden City is probably the one booking that can wreck your itinerary. It sells every ticket in advance, and the buying window opens at a specific hour, seven days out. Miss that hour in peak season and you are left refreshing a booking page at midnight.

The system is simpler for foreigners than most blog posts make it look. You do not need a Chinese ID, and the official rules, published by the Palace Museum itself, fit on one page. You also have a real choice of channel: the ticketing website works in a normal browser, so WeChat is optional rather than required. This guide walks through all of it, with the numbers checked against the Palace Museum’s own ticketing pages.

What do Forbidden City tickets cost?

The Palace Museum runs two price seasons:

Ticket	Dates	Price
Main gate ticket (peak)	Apr 1 – Oct 31	¥60
Main gate ticket (off-peak)	Nov 1 – Mar 31	¥40
Treasure Gallery (珍宝馆) add-on	All year	¥10
Clock Gallery (钟表馆) add-on	All year	¥10

A few things worth knowing about how these prices work:

• The ticket is valid only on the booked date. You cannot buy a flexible-date ticket.
• The two ¥10 galleries sit inside the palace complex, past the main ticket check. You add them when you book, not at the door.
• A full visit (main ticket plus both galleries) runs ¥80 in peak season. That is worth remembering when you see resellers charging double.
• Students aged 18 and over in undergraduate programs or below can buy a student ticket for ¥20 in either season with a student ID. The official price policy does not restrict this by nationality.
• Other concessions exist, but most are tied to Chinese ID documents: seniors get half price with a Chinese resident ID, and visitors under 18 with Chinese citizenship (including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan residents) enter free. As a short-term visitor with a passport, plan on the standard price.

When do tickets go on sale, and how fast do they sell out?

Every ticket goes on sale 7 days before the visit date, at 20:00 Beijing time. That is the entire release schedule. There is no earlier pre-sale, no travel-agent allotment, and no same-day window. The Palace Museum does not sell tickets on site at all.

How fast they disappear depends on the date:

• Off-season weekdays (Nov–Mar): usually available for hours, sometimes days.
• Peak season (Apr–Oct) and any weekend: Chinese travel media covering recent peak seasons report hot dates regularly selling out within an hour of release. Public holidays like Golden Week in early October are the tightest dates of all.

The routine that works: set an alarm for 19:55 Beijing time, open the official booking page on your laptop with your passport already in hand, and book the moment the calendar flips. Your phone’s world clock app shows Beijing time if you are planning from abroad.

One more date rule catches visitors out: the Forbidden City is closed every Monday, except during Chinese statutory holidays. If your Beijing stay includes a Monday, book your palace visit for another day.

How do foreigners book? Step-by-step with a passport

There are exactly two official channels:

1. The official ticketing site: ticket.dpm.org.cn
2. The official WeChat mini-program: 故宫博物院 (“The Palace Museum”)

Both draw from the same ticket pool. The Palace Museum states plainly that it has not authorised any third party to sell or resell its tickets, and that booking outside the official channels is how visitors lose money to fake listings.

Booking through the website:

1. Go to ticket.dpm.org.cn (works in a normal browser).
2. Select your visit date. Only dates within the next 7 days are visible.
3. On the visitor form, choose passport as the document type. The dropdown also lists mainland ID cards, Hong Kong/Macau travel permits, Taiwan travel permits, residence permits for Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan residents, and the foreign permanent residence ID.
4. Enter your name exactly as it appears in your passport, plus the passport number.
5. Pick a session (morning or afternoon) and any add-on galleries (Treasure Gallery, Clock Gallery).
6. Pay and screenshot the confirmation QR code.

Three rules the booking form enforces:

• One passport, one ticket per day. A family of four needs four passports and four bookings in the same order.
• The passport you book with is the passport you enter with. The QR code alone is not enough. Staff scan your original document at the gate, and face-recognition equipment assists the identity check as a speed measure.
• Sold means sold as booked. Once issued, a ticket cannot be switched to a different ticket type, date, or session, and the named visitor cannot be swapped. If your plans change, the move is cancel-and-rebook, not amend.

The two sessions have hard cutoffs worth knowing before you pick: morning-session visitors must pass through the ticket check by 12:00 on the day, and afternoon-session visitors can enter from 11:00 onward. Book morning if you want the full day inside; book afternoon if you would rather pair it with a slow breakfast and arrive after the first rush.

If you already use WeChat, the mini-program route is identical in substance: same dates, same passport field, same pool. If you do not use WeChat, the website is the simpler path. Do not install an app just for this.

One heads-up about the official site: it still displays some leftover COVID-era text, including a mention of nucleic acid test requirements and a checkbox about test results. No health documents are part of the actual entry process now. It is stale website copy the museum never cleaned up, and it has confused more than a few readers, so you can ignore it.

One payment detail to sort out before the 20:00 release: the official checkout is built around Alipay and WeChat Pay. If you have not set up either app with your foreign card yet, do that before your booking window opens. See our China payments walkthrough for the setup. We have not independently tested foreign-card checkout on the official ticketing site, so treat that part as unverified and have a backup plan.

Official channel vs booking sites: an honest comparison

You will see Trip.com, Klook and other platforms selling “Forbidden City entry” listings. How do they stack up against booking direct?

	Official (ticket.dpm.org.cn / mini-program)	Resale platforms (Trip.com, Klook, etc.)
Price	Face value: ¥60 / ¥40 + ¥10 galleries	Face value plus a service fee or markup
Refunds	Free until 24:00 the day before, clear rules on the official page	Varies by listing and seller
Language	Booking form is usable with a passport; mini-program is Chinese-language	Full English checkout
Inventory	The actual pool, released 7 days ahead at 20:00	Resells from the same pool after release

Chinese travel media covering recent peak seasons flagged the standard resale problems: marked-up prices, tickets bundled with insurance you did not ask for, and refund processes that are harder than the official channel. None of this makes the platforms a scam. You are paying for English-language convenience on top of a ticket you could usually buy yourself.

My recommendation, in order:

1. Book official at 20:00, seven days out. Face price, official refund rules, and you are done in five minutes.
2. If official is sold out and your dates are fixed, a reseller like Trip.com can still get you in. Read the refund terms before paying, and expect a markup over face value.
3. Never buy from individuals at the gate. There is no legitimate secondary market at the Meridian Gate, and a ticket tied to someone else’s passport number will not get you through the ID check.

Sold out on the official site? Your realistic options

The Palace Museum’s published rules do not include a waitlist or standby system. What you actually have:

Late-night releases. Chinese travellers consistently report tickets reappearing between 20:10 and 20:30 on release night, as failed payments get pushed back into the pool, and a smaller wave around 21:00. These are community reports rather than official policy, but the pattern is mentioned often enough that ten minutes of refreshing is worth a try.

Day-before cancellations. Refunds are free until 24:00 the day before, so a chunk of inventory genuinely returns to the pool the evening before each date. Check around 21:00 to 23:00 the night before your preferred day.

A reported “waitlist” feature. Some Chinese guide posts describe a waitlist option inside the official mini-program, with claimed success rates around 30%. The official pages do not document this feature, so treat it as unverified. If you see it in the app, use it, but do not build your trip around it.

Shift the date. The brutal-but-reliable option. A Tuesday visit in late November is a completely different game from a Saturday in early October. If your heart is set on the palace and not the date, moving one day often solves the problem.

Refunds, no-shows, and the 60-day ban

The cancellation rules are stricter than at most attractions, and they are enforced per ID document:

• Free refund until 24:00 the day before your visit, through the channel you booked with. No penalty.
• Same-day cancellation is possible until 20:00 for the whole order, but it counts as one no-show.
• Travelling in a group and one person drops out? Cancel that person’s ticket through the booking channel, or at the service window by the Meridian Gate before ticket check (open 08:30 to 16:00 in peak season, until 15:30 off-peak), and it stays penalty-free. Whole-order same-day cancellations are the ones that sting.
• Three no-shows within any 180-day period and your ID is blocked from booking Forbidden City tickets or exhibitions for 60 days, starting the day after the third strike.
• Money comes back within 5 business days, to the account that paid. Tickets that have been used are not refundable.

If your itinerary is still shifting, book the palace for a date you are confident about and sort the rest of Beijing around it. The no-show counter is not a fine, but for a traveller on a two-week trip, a 60-day block effectively means one shot at getting it right.

On the day: getting in through the Meridian Gate

Everything funnels to one entrance. Visitors enter through the Meridian Gate (午门), the massive south gate facing Tiananmen Square, and exit from the north (Shenwu Gate) or east (Donghua Gate) sides. There is no entry from any other direction.

Bring:

• The original passport you booked with. This is the single most important item. A photo or a photocopy will not pass the document check.
• Your confirmation QR code (usually scanned together with the passport).
• Water and sunscreen in summer. The queue at security has no shade.

Security screening runs like an airport: bags through the X-ray, walk through the gate, passport out. In peak season the Meridian Gate queue can take 20 to 40 minutes from the back, so arrive before your session rather than at the exact minute.

The streets around the palace are one-way for visitors on foot: the Tiananmen area routes everyone south to north. If you are only visiting the Forbidden City, you can skip the square entirely and walk to the Meridian Gate along the east or west side avenues (Dongtongzihe or Xitongzihe roads). If you are doing the square and the palace in one morning, follow the crowd through the square’s security checkpoints and continue north; the gate faces you at the end.

The Tiananmen Square combo trick

Here is the detail that saves most first-timers a confusing morning: a same-day Forbidden City reservation also gets you into Tiananmen Square without a separate square booking. The square has required its own (free) reservation for some years now, but visitors holding bookings for the Forbidden City, the National Museum, the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, Zhongshan Park, or the Working People’s Cultural Palace are waved through on that reservation alone.

If you are visiting the square on a different day from the palace, you need to book it separately:

• Cost: free.
• Window: 1 to 7 days ahead. There is no same-day square booking.
• Sessions: the square books by date and time slot, and the sunrise flag-raising session is the competitive one.
• For foreigners: book with your passport details (name, document number, phone number). Official channels include the square’s reservation portal run by the Tiananmen area management authority, plus several Chinese apps and mini-programs, and the published rules state an English version of the system is planned for foreign visitors. Questions: 010-65016000.

The flag-raising session is the one that needs planning. The time shifts with sunrise, and the good viewing spots fill up an hour or more in advance.

Are the ¥10 galleries worth adding?

Both add-ons are booked alongside the main ticket, and at ¥10 each the decision is easy: add the Treasure Gallery. It holds the imperial collection highlights and is the one most visitors remember. The Clock Gallery is a single hall of European mechanical clocks, delightful if that is your thing, skippable if you are racing a 3 pm flight.

If you are doing the full north-south walk from the Meridian Gate to the Imperial Garden, the galleries sit roughly mid-route, so they break up the sequence well.

The short version

Book 7 days out at 20:00 Beijing time, on ticket.dpm.org.cn, with your passport in hand. Pay ¥60 or ¥40, add the Treasure Gallery, and mind the morning-session 12:00 entry cutoff. Cancel before midnight the day before if plans change. Enter from the south with your original passport, exit north, and climb Jingshan Park for the view back. Walk the square on the same reservation. That is 95% of what you need.

For the rest of your Beijing planning (what else to see and reserve, payments, getting online), see the Beijing city hub, the China travel essentials guides, and the full FAQ library.