Free admissions bring high costs to local museums

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-11-21 18:54

BEIJING - "Now that it's free, I'm bringing all my friends," former soldier Zhang Xiaozhuang, 50, said here on Friday as he got ready to enter the city's military museum.

It was Zhang's second visit. This time around, Zhang, who hails from Beijing's neighboring Hebei Province, brought along five fellow veterans.

They're now in a different kind of army: that of the visitors who've flocked to Chinese museums since most of them became free early in 2008. Admission fees were abolished at national and provincial-level museums, except for a few cultural relics such as the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, both in Beijing.

But now, museums are complaining of the financial pinch caused by a combination of increasing visitor traffic and decreasing revenue.

Lin Dan, spokeswoman for the Fujian Provincial Museum in southern China, said: "We need more money to hire security staff to protect the new visitors and the exhibits."

Only a few hundred people showed up each day when they had to pay 30 yuan (about US$4.5) to get in. But after admission became free during the Spring Festival (Lunar New Year), daily visitor numbers soared to more than 10,000.

Facilities began to show the strain. "Doors were broken, and somebody even tore off the trunk of an elephant specimen," said Lin.

"We need more financial support to keep things going," she said.

Fujian Museum isn't alone in its plight. On September 25, two-thirds of the country's provincial museum curators met in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province, and issued a call for financial support from the government.

Liu Chaoying, an official with the Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage, said they had received a petition calling for financial help from museums in the capital city.

"But more assessment needs to be done and there's no way to determine how to compensate museums fairly," he said. He estimated that 100 million yuan a year would be needed to subsidize Beijing's museums.

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