All 150,000 entry tickets (30,000 for each day) to the Palace Museum in Beijing during the five-day May Day holiday are sold out. During the holiday, the museum will open at 8 am, half an hour earlier than usual.

On May 1, a new ceramics gallery of the museum will open for public viewing amid wide expectation after about two years' preparation.

The new gallery is set in the Hall of Martial Valor (Wuying Dian) in the west side of the museum, where over 1,000 highlighted Chinese ceramics ranging from 8,000 years ago to the early 20th century are on display.

Due to the need to contain COVID-19, up to 3,000 people are allowed every day in Wuying Dian (2,000 in the morning and 1,000 in the afternoon).

To enter the museum, visitors could buy tickets either on-site or through the website gugong.ktmtech.cn or through the museum's official WeChat account without any extra charge.

Separately, for a more comfortable visiting experience and protection of cultural heritages, the Palace Museum announced on Friday that the daily cap for number of visitors will be adjusted to 40,000 even if the COVID-19 containment policy was lifted in the future. Before the outbreak of coronavirus, the number used to be 80,000.

Digitization channels may resolve those people's regrets who are unable to see the exhibits in person. For example, over 8,000 artifacts are also "exhibited" in a virtual gallery of ceramics on the museum's website, and a new mobile device app of the ceramics gallery will go online later this year.