Discover Beijing
Capital Museum
首都博物馆
The city museum of Beijing itself, tracing 3,000 years of urban history and 800 years as a capital through Ming-Qing porcelain, folk-custom displays and a good bronze collection. Free, quiet, and the clearest explanation anywhere of how the city you are walking around came to be laid out that way.
The story
What makes this place special
Beijing's own city museum, opened in 1981 with some 83,000 objects, part of its collection formerly housed at the Confucius Temple on Guozijian Street, and moved into its present purpose-built home in 2006. The building was designed by Jean-Marie Duthilleul and Cui Kai: a stone outer wall intended to read as a city wall and gate tower, with a large oval bronze-clad exhibition hall set at a slant through the facade, meant to suggest a relic being lifted out of the ground. A danbi stone is set into the ground before the north gate and a Ming archway stands inside the reception hall, placed to give the building a central axis in the Chinese manner. The collection runs to over 200,000 objects, mostly excavated in Beijing, of which only a small part is shown.
What you’ll discover
A tall, light, modern atrium with two systems of galleries: the oval bronze tower, which you walk up through for the themed collections - bronzes, porcelain, jade, calligraphy and painting, Buddhist sculpture - and the rectangular block alongside, which holds the chronological history of Beijing as a city and the folk-customs displays of old Beijing life, weddings, shopfronts and courtyard interiors. The Beijing history gallery is the reason to come: it is the only place that lays out how the city moved, was rebuilt and was walled from the Liao to the present.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Visit this before you walk the hutongs or the imperial sites, not after. The city-history gallery explains the plan of Beijing - why the axis runs where it does, what the walls enclosed, what was demolished - and nothing on the ground tells you that.
- The folk-customs floor, with its reconstructed courtyard rooms and wedding processions, is the most enjoyable part and the least visited.
- It is free with a booking and your passport, and because it is out at Muxidi rather than in the tourist centre it is rarely full - a much easier booking than the National Museum.
- Muxidi station on Line 1 is a few minutes away, and the museum makes a good pairing with the Military Museum one stop further west if that interests you; otherwise it is a destination on its own.
- The porcelain and bronze galleries in the oval tower are good but overlap with the National Museum. If you are doing both, do the themed collections there and the city history here.
- Allow two hours. It is large but not exhausting, and it is one of the better places in Beijing to be on a day of bad air or heavy rain.
When to come
Weekday afternoons; it is quiet by Beijing museum standards. Any season - this is a good bad-weather and bad-air-quality option.
Getting around
Excellent. A 2006 building with lifts to every floor, level galleries, wide ramps at the entrance, accessible toilets, loan wheelchairs and seating throughout. The oval tower is lift-served. The only issues are the total distance if you try to see everything and the dim lighting in the painting and calligraphy rooms. Muxidi metro station's lift provision should be checked, as Line 1 stations vary.
Worth knowing before you go
Both the closing day and the evening hours differ between Chinese listings, so confirm on the museum's WeChat account the day before - turning up on the wrong Monday or Tuesday is the standard mistake. Note this is the original west-side museum, not the newer Grand Canal Museum branch out in Tongzhou.
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