Chinese culture authorities have vowed to open up 500 public museums and memorial halls free to visitors this year in its drive to give tax payers better access to high culture, but museums now face a tide of culture-hungry people which threatens to overwhelm their facilities.

Both museum managers and visitors are unsure when chaotic scenes in free-tour museums will come to an end, after free-admission experiments in some museums led to chaos.

The Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution became the first national museum in Beijing to pilot the free admission on March 1, when over 12,000 visitors flocked in, compared with a daily average of 1,200 visitors a week ago. The number leaped up to over 24,000 on the second day, and a little higher than that on the third day.

The museum recruited 40 security guards from a security company to help keep order.

Litter was everywhere. Washrooms were crowded. In the exhibition room of weapons, parents willingly ignored safety warnings, allowing their children to use a missile boat as a slide, and climb onto an iron cannon to pose for photos.

A woman surnamed Liu said that she could not bear the crowd and bad behavior in such a civilized museum, where an exhibition illustrating the ups and downs of China on the road of national revival since 1840 was on show.

Yu Zhihong, deputy director of the museum said that the museum would keep the maximum daily number of free entry under 30,000, and renovate washrooms and exhibition facilities to better cope with the large stream of visitors.

A cross-sectoral government circular was issued on January 23 asking all government-sponsored museums and memorial halls to introduce free admission by 2009.

Historical sites and museums built on relic sites, such as the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City, however, are not included in the free admission policy.

The Ministry of Finance announced in February that the central government will offer funding to cover the operating expenses of museums.

Vice Minister of Finance Zhang Shaochun said that the operating expenses of all national museums and memorial halls would be covered from the central budget, while institutions at the provincial level would be jointly supported by central and local budgets.