Booking China attraction tickets with a passport, not a Chinese ID

Your passport is accepted as a booking document at nearly every ticketed attraction in China, but the Chinese ID number that locals tap in is not something you have, so the booking channel decides whether you get in. Try the channels below in order and move down when one rejects you.

The steps

1. Find out whether the gate sells tickets at all. The Palace Museum does not sell tickets on the day of your visit and caps daily numbers at 40,000; the National Museum of China is free but admits nobody without a real-name reservation. Most other paid attractions, including park-and-temple sites, keep a staffed counter for foreign visitors.
2. Use the attraction's own English site first. The Palace Museum runs one at bookingticket.dpm.org.cn, where you create an account with an email address and passport number, choose a date and time slot, then pay by Alipay, WeChat Pay or a Chinese bank card. Foreign visitors are required to give passport numbers when booking. Tickets open seven days ahead; entry is by scanning the same passport at the Meridian Gate, and there is no physical ticket.
3. Try an official WeChat mini-program next. When the ID-type menu offers 护照 (passport) or 其他证件 (other document), pick it and type your details. The Temple of Heaven, for example, lets foreign visitors book 1–7 days ahead through its official WeChat account and enter on a QR code plus the document used to book.
4. Fall back to an authorised international platform. These take overseas cards, hold allocations for foreign passports and give you English support. Booking through one of these is the practical route when an official portal demands a +86 phone number. Trip.com Ticketing platforms vary by price and cancellation terms, so it is worth compare all before you commit.
5. Type your name exactly as it appears in the machine-readable zone at the bottom of the passport photo page: no accents, no spaces or dashes in the passport number, every given name in the given-name field. One passport gets one ticket per visit date, and children and infants need their own passport and their own reservation.
6. Carry the physical passport on the day and look for the manual lane, labelled Passport, Manual Service, Foreign Visitors or 综合服务. Photos of your passport on a phone are not accepted.

What it costs and when it releases

At the Palace Museum, admission is CNY 60 from 1 April to 31 October and CNY 40 from 1 November to 31 March, with the Treasure Gallery and the Gallery of Clocks at CNY 10 each. It closes Mondays except national holidays. National Museum of China reservations release daily at 17:00 Beijing time, seven days ahead, on its English portal. At the Temple of Heaven, a passport-holder admission ticket is CNY 20, a concession CNY 10, and a high-season combo covering the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest, Echo Wall and Circular Mound Altar is CNY 34 — tickets open 1–7 days ahead and same-day purchase is possible only if the park has not hit capacity.

The rules are not identical for every traveller. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan residents book with their home-return permits and need Chinese-character names. Mainland Chinese passport and ID holders are excluded from the passport-based products sold on international platforms, and some venues, such as the Chengdu Panda Base, list authorised platforms that do not extend to every attraction in the country.

Last checked: 2026-09-27