A year inside the Qing court used to mean a calendar, a hunting ground and a great deal of ceremony. Qing Court in Four Seasons: Life and Culture of the Imperial Household now puts that year in one room. The Hong Kong Palace Museum opened the show on November 4 in Gallery 2, with 187 treasures lent by the Palace Museum in Beijing. It runs through November 3, 2028.
From a day in the Forbidden City to a full year
Gallery 2, the museum's largest gallery, previously held From Dawn to Dusk: Life and Art in the Forbidden City, which followed a single day inside the palace. This exhibition stretches that idea across the seasons. It is jointly organized by the Hong Kong Palace Museum and the Palace Museum, with artistic and design direction from OLI Architecture. The official announcement notes that the 1,700-square-metre gallery takes its colors from the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, the Siku Quanshu: green for spring, vermilion for summer, moon-white for autumn and charcoal-grey for winter.
To keep the year feeling alive, selected works will rotate every three months.
How the Qing court moved with the year
The show opens with the calendar itself. Qing rulers treated an accurate calendar, drawn from the sky, as part of the right to govern. An introductory section, Align with the Cycle of the Year, presents astronomical instruments, including an armillary sphere that will be on view only for the first six months.
Spring turns to tilling and weaving, with ceremonies around agriculture and sericulture. One highlight is the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving, an album in which Prince Yinzhen, later the Yongzheng Emperor, and his consort appear as a farmer and a silkworm breeder. Six leaves are shown at a time and will rotate through the run. Summer follows the court to the cooler Chengde Mountain Resort, where the emperor received leaders of various tribes. Autumn moves to the Mulan Hunting Grounds for military training. Winter returns to the palace for Lunar New Year.
A twelve-month vase, a kapala and one hundred deer
Among the objects singled out on the official page is a vase with flowers of the twelve months, a Guangxu-period porcelain covered in overglaze enamels. It points back to the Flower Festival in the second lunar month, when the court honored flower deities and prayed for a good harvest. There is also a kapala from the Qianlong period, a Tibetan Buddhist ritual vessel made in the Imperial Workshops and set with gold, gems and hundreds of pearls. A vase with the One Hundred Deer pattern, painted enamels on a copper core, ties the show to the court's hunting culture. Deer were raised at imperial sites, and the name Mulan itself refers to a place for hunting them.
More object notes, including versions in other languages, are collected on the museum's key exhibition contents page.
Hong Kong Palace Museum hours and where it is
The museum is at 8 Museum Drive in the West Kowloon Cultural District, Kowloon. It is open Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm, and Friday, Saturday and public holidays from 10 am to 8 pm. It closes on Tuesdays, except public holidays, and on the first two days of the Lunar New Year. Check the Hong Kong Palace Museum site before you go, especially around holidays.
Most palace exhibitions pick a theme or a reign. This one borrows the court's own calendar and lets the year do the curating, which makes the objects feel less like treasures in a row and more like furniture in a very long day. For another museum show built around gifts and ceremony, read about Tapa: Art of the Gift in Polynesia at The Met, and for a different take on precious materials, Luxury and Loss at the Walters is still up.
