For those hoping to stop by key tourist attractions in the Chinese capital during Spring Festival holidays, admittance is not a given due to limited space within popular facilities.

As the holiday began, some were surprised to find that tickets to Beijing's Palace Museum had been sold out until Sunday, and they simply had to find other ways to enjoy their time off.

A quota restricting visitor numbers has been put in place by the museum since June 2015 to help with crowd control. 

Up to 80,000 people are allowed to enter the complex each day. Since October 2017, all tickets must be purchased online, and buying electronically has become second nature to more and more people.

ID cards are needed to buy digital tickets online, but a small number of paper-based tickets are still reserved as gifts for some, which are still valid for entry.

As regular tickets recently ran out of stock, stand-in commemorative tickets were going for over 200 yuan (30 U.S. dollars) during the holiday on Xianyu.com, a major secondhand trading website.

By comparison, tickets typically cost only 40 yuan in winter (from November to March). Nevertheless, visitors have many reasons to be keen on touring the palace during the holidays.

Apart from the Palace Museum, museums nationwide also witnessed a rising number of visitors. 

In central China, the Henan Museum received about 8,000 visits on Feb. 6, the second day of the Chinese New Year, two times the figure of a regular weekend day.

Many museums are staging exhibitions featuring pigs, the Chinese Zodiac animal of the New Year. A pig-shaped bronze vessel, which dates back to more than 3,000 years ago, is on display for the first time in the Shanghai Museum.

In addition, the country's tourist destinations received 415 million visits during the Spring Festival holiday, and 40 percent of the tourists visited museums, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism said on Sunday. 

(Cover: Aerial view of the Palace Museum. /VCG Photo)

(With inputs from Xinhua)