Annual pass opens doors to many museums

Additionally, the city's most renowned privately-owned museums in Beijing are also included. For example, holders of the pass can visit the China Red Sandalwood Museum-a place displaying luxurious traditional Chinese furniture-for free, and also enjoy access at half price to the Guanfu Museum, the home of the antique hoard of collector, Ma Weidu.

Tickets to the Palace Museum, China's former imperial palace also known as the Forbidden City, are not included in the annual pass, but the pass can be used for the country's top-tier science museums, such as the Beijing Planetarium and National Zoological Museum.

"With the pass, museum operators hope to attract more public attention and they also want their collections to benefit society," says Cao. "The annual pass is an effective way to lower the threshold for entering museums."

If all tickets in the annual pass were purchased individually, it would cost more than 3,000 yuan ($432).

Beijing had 179 registered museums by 2017, making it the city with the second largest number of museums in the world, second only to London, according to statistics from the Beijing Museums Association.

The first annual pass for Beijing museums was released in the 1990s.