Published : 2025-12-19
The museum in China with the greatest number of cultural relics has a collection of 1.8 million items, 1.4 million more than the Louvre. Can you guess where it is? The answer is the Palace Museum in Beijing, which is established in 1925.
It has the world's largest palace complex, where a total of 24 emperors from the Ming and Qing dynasties resided, leaving behind a large number of precious cultural relics.
The Museum staff spent seven years to compile an accurate figure—over 1.8 million items. Of the 4.01 million precious-grade cultural relics in the entire country, over 40% are in the Palace Museum.
3 Chinese museums with the most cultural relics
600 years of history have left countless treasures in the Forbidden City. Although a batch of cultural relics was taken to Taiwan around the 1950s, most of them still remain in the Palace Museum.
From 1924 to 2011, the Palace Museum conducted five inventories of its cultural relics, the last of which took seven years, meticulously cross-referencing physical objects with archives to compile the most comprehensive and accurate figure in its history—a total collection of over 1.8 million cultural relics.
In 2014, the Palace Museum conducted another inventory, which increased the number of items in the collection to over 1.86 million. This firmly secures its position as the institution with the "largest collection of cultural relics."
The second and third places are held respectively by the Shaanxi History Museum (陝西歷史博物館) with 1.71 million items in its collection and the National Museum of China (中國國家博物館) with 1.4 million items in its collection.
The Palace Museum's collection is divided into 25 major categories, including paintings, calligraphy, ceramics, jade wares, bronzes, textiles and embroideries, sculptures, and so on, covering nearly all categories of Chinese cultural relics.
Among them, there are also 25,000 foreign cultural relics, including Western clocks and watches, enamels, and Western paintings, most of which are treasures left from the "myriad nations paying tribute" period of the Ming and Qing dynasties. They are considered to be a testament to the cultural exchange along the "Silk Road".
The Chinese museum with the greatest number of precious cultural relics
What makes it unique is that museum collections usually follow a "pyramid" structure, where most items are general artefacts and rare treasures form just the tiny peak.
The Palace Museum, however, has an "inverted pyramid" structure, with over 93% of its cultural relics being precious-grade (Grade I, Grade II, and Grade III), making it the Chinese museum with the largest collection of precious cultural relics.
There are a total of 4.01 million existing precious cultural relics in China, housed in 4,105 museums across the country, and the Palace Museum alone holds 1.68 million of them.
Today, the Palace Museum continues to tirelessly collect lost cultural relics while strengthening the conservation of cultural relics. For example, the "Safe Palace Museum" (平安故宮) project was launched in 2013 to address hidden dangers such as fire alarms, theft, earthquakes, the collection environment, and visitor safety.
As the museum with the greatest number of cultural relics in China, the Palace Museum has, in recent years, while "preserving the old," also been keen to innovate. It has applied the latest technologies to create a "Digital Palace Museum," and has also launched a series of cultural and creative products which are very popular among young people.
Read more: The Palace Museum: From museum to a trendy cultural centre
