Qing Court in Four Seasons Exhibition Opens in Hong Kong With 187 Treasures

The Qing Court in Four Seasons exhibition opened to the public on 4 November 2026 at the Hong Kong Palace Museum, and its organising idea is disarmingly simple: follow an emperor through one full year. The show brings 187 treasures from the Palace Museum in Beijing into Gallery 2, the museum’s largest, and arranges them by season rather than by material or reign (Hong Kong Palace Museum). It runs until 3 November 2028 (Hong Kong Palace Museum).

The museum has form here. Gallery 2 previously hosted “From Dawn to Dusk,” which compressed court life into a single day; this exhibition stretches the same conceit from a day to a year, with selected exhibits rotated every three months so repeat visits land on different objects (Hong Kong Palace Museum).

Inside the Qing Court in Four Seasons exhibition

Design does quiet storytelling of its own. The gallery echoes the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, the Qing-era Siku Quanshu, whose four categories were colour-coded to the seasons — so each section takes its own palette: verdant green for spring, vermilion for summer, moon-white for autumn, charcoal-grey for winter (Hong Kong Palace Museum).

The show opens with time itself. An introductory section, “Align with the Cycle of the Year,” displays Qing astronomical instruments, including an armillary sphere on view only during the first six months, because the court’s calendar — issued each year in a ceremony at the Meridian Gate — governed daily life across Qing society (Hong Kong Palace Museum). Rule, in this telling, began with getting the year right.

Spring belongs to work the emperor performed, not just ordered. The “Pictures of Tilling and Weaving” album shows Prince Yinzhen, the future Yongzheng Emperor, depicted as a working farmer while his consort appears as a silkworm breeder, with poems the prince inscribed himself; six leaves show at a time, rotating through the run (Hong Kong Palace Museum). Qing court seasonal rituals were theatre with a policy point: agriculture and sericulture were the economy, and the throne acted out its respect for both.

Summer at Chengde, autumn at Mulan

Heat moved the court. From the Kangxi period onward, emperors spent roughly the fifth to ninth lunar months at the Chengde Mountain Resort, where they reviewed memorials, handled military and political business and received allied leaders — government conducted at altitude, in cooler air (Hong Kong Palace Museum).

Two summer objects carry the diplomacy. A right-spiralling conch was presented to the Qianlong Emperor by the Sixth Panchen Lama for his 70th birthday at Chengde, and a 1.2-metre clock with ducks and lotuses in a basin pairs a Chinese cloisonné basin with a French musical mechanism, its petals opening to reveal a homage scene (Hong Kong Palace Museum). The exhibition page adds a kapala ritual bowl crafted by the Imperial Workshops, its pearl inlay recorded as consuming 432 pearls (Hong Kong Palace Museum).

Autumn meant horses, deer and drills. At the Mulan Hunting Grounds the court turned to military training; the grounds’ Manchu name literally meant “the site for deer hunting” (Hong Kong Palace Museum). On display are a vase with the “One Hundred Deer” pattern, an antler armchair made from antlers of deer hunted by the Kangxi Emperor, and a 2.5-metre tiger spear used by the Tiger-Hunting Brigade of imperial guards (Hong Kong Palace Museum).

Winter closes the loop at home. A three-panel screen, 3 metres tall and 3.6 metres long, depicts Lunar New Year at court — lantern dances, firecrackers, the burning of pine and cypress to dispel misfortune — alongside ruyi sceptres and embroidered pouches of gold charm coins given as New Year gifts (Hong Kong Palace Museum). An interactive station lets visitors trace the character fu, blessings, in the emperor’s own New Year calligraphy ritual (Hong Kong Palace Museum).

Palace Museum treasures on a two-year stage

Context helps explain the scale. The Hong Kong Palace Museum, opened in 2022 in the West Kowloon Cultural District, is a collaboration between the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority and the Palace Museum, whose collection holds over 1.95 million items (Hong Kong Palace Museum). A two-year run for a loan exhibition is long; the quarterly rotations are the mechanism that keeps it from going stale, and China Services Info’s short guide frames the show exactly that way — fresh discoveries with each seasonal visit (China Services Info).

Practicalities are plain. Hong Kong Palace Museum tickets for Galleries 1 to 7 cost HK$70 for adults and HK$35 for concessions, with children aged six and below free, and the museum is open 10am–6pm on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, until 8pm on Fridays, Saturdays and public holidays, closed Tuesdays (Hong Kong Palace Museum). Even the gift shop is on theme: a merchandise line called “Imperial Cats: Endless Treasures in Four Seasons” recasts court scenes with a Feline Emperor and an Imperial Consort Cat (Hong Kong Palace Museum).

What lingers is the governing metaphor. A court that issued its calendar by ceremony, farmed on schedule, decamped for summer, hunted for training and feasted for renewal was using the year itself as an instrument of rule — and the exhibition, spread across two full years of real time, lets visitors feel that rhythm at something close to its original pace.

Photo: Anja Pietsch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Sources

1. https://www.hkpm.org.hk/en/about/press-release/hong-kong-palace-museum-s-new-thematic-exhibition-qing-court-in-four-seasons-life-and-culture-of-the-imperial-household-opens-4-november-2026
2. https://www.hkpm.org.hk/en/exhibition/qing-court-in-four-seasons-life-and-culture-of-the-imperial-household
3. http://www.chinaservicesinfo.com/s/202611/06/WS6aed8f12498e368550341519/hong-kong-palace-museum-explores-the-four-seasons-of-qing-court-life.html