Beijing Imperial Palace Tickets and Tours

For the Forbidden City the station is Tiananmen East on Line 1, exit B, which puts you on the axis south of the Meridian Gate. That gate is the only way in, in every season and for every ticket type, so there is no second approach to work out. Subway fares run by distance and start at 3 CNY, which covers anything up to six kilometres, so the crossing costs less than a bottle of water either way.

For the Summer Palace the station is Beigongmen on Line 4, exit D, about three minutes on foot from the park's north gate. Xiyuan, the interchange with Line 16, is often named as an alternative, and we are not going to tell you which gate it serves because no source we reached would say. The same honesty applies at the other end of the museum: you come out of the Forbidden City at Shenwumen or at Donghuamen, never back through the Meridian Gate, and there is no reliable published answer for the nearest station to either exit. Plan the second half of that day from the north or east side of the old city, not from the square you started on.

Monday is the one day of the week that plans a Beijing trip for you, and it does it quietly. The Palace Museum is closed every Monday except on official national holidays. The Summer Palace is not: no source we reached names any weekly closing day for the park, which is consistent with it being a municipal park rather than a museum. So Monday is the Summer Palace day, by elimination.

There is a catch, and it is small enough that nobody writes it down. Suzhou Street and Dehe Yuan close on Mondays too, holidays aside, and those are two of the three enclosures that the combined ticket pays for. A Monday visitor who buys the combined ticket is buying access to one of the three things it adds. The reverse mistake is more common and more expensive: a traveller who has learned by now that Beijing palaces shut on Mondays writes the whole day off, and loses the only day of the week when the choice was already made for them.

Every listing that sells both palaces on the same day runs eight hours or more. That is arithmetic rather than an impression, and it falls straight out of this catalogue: 6 of the 20 Forbidden City listings pass eight hours, 12 of the 20 Summer Palace listings do, and only 13 products in the whole Chinese tree do, which leaves exactly five overlapping, and five is also the number of products that carry both palaces. There is no short version of the two-palace day, and nobody is selling one.

Underneath that, the two sites behave differently. Two of the Forbidden City listings finish inside two hours and four of the Summer Palace ones do, so quick visits exist in both places. What differs is the middle of the range: 240 minutes against 480. The Palace Museum is a morning that can be stretched, and the Summer Palace is a day that has been filled with other things because two to three hours of park does not fill one.

Twenty listings each, and one of them carries more than twice the reviews of the other. The Forbidden City side holds 8,227 reviews at a weighted 4.838; the Summer Palace side holds 3,758 at 4.748. The shapes of the two catalogues explain the gap better than any judgement about the buildings would.

The single most reviewed product in Beijing is a two-hour guided group entry to the Forbidden City at 19.27 EUR, rated 4.9 across 2,157 reviews. Nothing on the Summer Palace side resembles it. The most reviewed product there is the nine-hour classic day at 4.3, and after that a 18.92 EUR eight-hour coach that visits three sites and ends with Peking duck, which happens to be rated 5.0 across 645 reviews and is the best rated Chinese product we track. The Forbidden City rewards the short specific product. The Summer Palace only really sells inside a long one, and when the long one is well run it does very well indeed.

Read the titles of the long products and the same handful of names keeps turning up beside a palace: Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the Lama Temple, a hutong walk, and often enough to count, a panda house and a Peking duck dinner. Not one of those is a palace, and not one of them is a category on this site. What a Beijing day trip sells is a route through the city with an imperial site as its anchor, and the anchor is chosen for how much of the morning it eats.

The anchoring only works one way round. The Forbidden City sells perfectly well on its own: two hours, 19.27 EUR, entry included, 4.9 across 2,157 reviews, and no second stop. The Summer Palace hardly ever appears alone. Its cheapest listing is an hour-long entrance ticket at 6.90 EUR on 137 reviews, and then the range jumps straight to the full days, twelve of its twenty products running eight hours or more. Wanting the lake without a coach day around it is a reasonable thing to want, and the honest answer is that you buy the entry and take Line 4 yourself.

The practical difference between the two halves of the year is bigger at the Summer Palace than the table makes it look. In April the park gives you thirteen hours between opening and last entry, and the museum gives you seven and a half. In December the park gives eleven and a half and the museum something under eight, with a last admission it does not publish. If the plan is one palace in the morning and something else after lunch, the winter version of that plan has to start earlier than the summer one, and the part that has to start earlier is the museum.