No school, no playground, no museum or library — just long, drawn out home time. That’s the life most children around the country are leading amid the coronavirus outbreak.

To help children better cope with this hard time while letting them soak up some culture and history, the Palace Museum has partnered with CITIC Press Group to roll out I Want to Visit the Palace Museum, a 20-volume children’s encyclopedia, along with 10 eponymous free supplementary videos, to take readers aged between 5 and15 as well as curious adults, on a fun, immersive and in-depth tour of the 600-year-old royal palace.

Apart from acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the Ming and Qing (1368-1901) palace architecture, readers can also learn about 521 cultural artifacts housed in the museum, 126 historical events and 79 ancient crafts from this period.

“The Palace Museum is my favorite haunt, and I never get tired of going there no matter how many times I have already visited. I like this book, as it helped me learn much more about the museum,” one commenter said on Douban, China’s equivalent to Goodreads.

“My daughter loves the colorful cartoon illustrations in the book! They and the simple language are helping her understand the Palace Museum better,” one buyer commented on Dangdang, a popular book shopping site in China.

“The book and the video are a novel effort to explain the architecture of the Palace Museum, the history behind it and its core cultural relics with an easy-to-understand approach,” said Wang Xudong, director of the Palace Museum.

They were developed to help children understand the Palace Museum, as well as build an interest in the museum and the essence of traditional Chinese culture, the director added.

Click here to stream the videos

http://video.mct.gov.cn/v.html?id=5285890798947116634

http://video.mct.gov.cn/v.html?id=5285890798982145105

Yang Xiaoyu contributed to the story