National Palace Museum hopes for more visitors despite challenges

Taipei, Dec. 25 (CNA) The director of Taiwan's National Palace Museum said he "hopes" the major tourist attraction can attract 3.5 million visitors in 2025, the 100-year anniversary of the museum's founding in Beijing, despite current visitor numbers falling well short of the goal.

Speaking at a museum event on Tuesday, (蕭宗煌) said the museum has a goal of drawing 2.5 million visitors to its Northern Branch in Taipei and 1 million visitors to its Southern Branch in Chiayi County in 2025.

Official visitor numbers, however, show that the Northern Branch only attracted 1.5 million museum-goers while the Southern Branch saw around 0.9 million in 2023. The figures include both domestic and foreign visitors.

Between January and November this year, the Northern Branch welcomed nearly 1.7 million and the Southern Branch almost 0.9 million visitors, official statistics show, reflecting a year-on-year rise but still almost a million below the museum's 2025 target.

The ambitious 3.5 million visitor goal was set because of expectations that an improvement in cross-Taiwan Strait relations would lead to significantly greater numbers of Chinese visitors to the museum's collections, Hsiao suggested.

The number of Chinese visitors to Taiwan plummeted from roughly 2.7 million per year prior in the late 2010s to a mere 329,000 in the first 10 months of 2024 due to COVID-19 and Beijing's ongoing ban of visits by Chinese tour groups to Taiwan.

Whether the ban will be fully or partially lifted in 2025 remains unknown, but "regardless of whether the two sides of the Taiwan strait open up next year, efforts will still be made to attract 3.5 million visitors," the former deputy culture minister said.

Reflecting challenges facing Taiwan's tourism industry more generally, the National Palace Museum -- one of the country's top attractions for overseas visitors -- has struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels.

In 2019, before COVID-19 severely disrupted international traveler flows, the National Palace Museum recorded 3.8 million visitors to its Northern Branch alone -- more than twice as many as are expected to visit five years later.

Lagging visitor numbers are not the only challenge facing the museum that houses nearly 700,000 artifacts including ancient bronzes, ceramics, jade items, paintings and carvings from China.

Also speaking at the event on Tuesday, Administrative-affairs Deputy Director Huang Yung-tai (黃永泰) said the museum will report to the Legislature "in the future" over the budget freeze imposed on the state-funded museum's renovation.

Lawmakers this month froze the NT$350 million budget for the New National Palace Museum Plan, casting doubt on whether the museum's ongoing renovation project will be completed on time.

Huang, however, said progress was being made on the renovation, with the Northern Branch's library building expected to open as a second exhibition area in June 2025.