The Palace Museum Photo: IC

The Palace Museum and the National Library in Beijing will reopen on Friday for the upcoming May 1 holiday after months of closure, a sign that the capital is gradually returning to normalcy.

All 25,000 tickets for the Palace Museum over the five-day holiday which will start from Friday had sold out by Thursday morning. The Palace Museum said it would partially reopen from Friday, according to notices on its website and its public WeChat account on Wednesday evening. 

Beijing on Thursday lowered its public health emergency response from the top level to the second. 

Many Chinese netizens commented that they had been waiting a long time to visit the museum. Also known as the Forbidden City, the museum suspended visits from January 25 due to the COVID-19 outbreak. 

With its daily number of visitors now limited to 5,000, people hoping to visit the tourist attraction need to make reservations online. Tickets for May 1 sold out within 95 minutes, reported the Xinhua News Agency.    

Shortly after the Palace Museum's announcement, the National Museum of China in Beijing also announced it would reopen. City-level museums and public libraries will also gradually resume accepting public visitors starting May 1, requiring real-name reservations and limiting daily numbers of visitors, said local authorities earlier on Wednesday. 

A total of 20 tourist sites across seven parks in Beijing including the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace and Beihai Park, also began accepting public visitors again on Wednesday. According to data from consumer website Meituan, visits to Beijing tourist sites on Wednesday afternoon increased 199 percent, and were triple last week's figures.

Just half an hour after the city announced on Wednesday it would downgrade its virus response level, the number of May Day holiday flight bookings from Beijing increased 15 times compared with the average number of bookings in the last week on online travel agency qunar.com, signaling a tourism boom for the holiday.  

Global Times