Palace Museum North Branch

The Palace Museum North Branch is a major new campus of Beijing's Palace Museum, rising in Haidian District's Xibeiwang area beside the Cuihu wetland, roughly thirty kilometers from the Forbidden City. Designed by the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, its gray outer walls, red inner walls, and golden double-eaved roofs consciously echo the Forbidden City along an ordered east-west axis. Spanning around 102,000 square meters, the complex groups artifact display, conservation, and administrative buildings, with roughly 35,000 square meters of exhibition space across a dozen galleries capable of showing tens of thousands of relics each year, dramatically expanding the museum's capacity to conserve and present the imperial collection.