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TEA announces 2025 global museum visitor list. The Forbidden City in Beijing tops the list with 19 million visitors. The top three places were occupied by Chinese museums, showing that the popularity of Asian attractions is clearly ahead.
Museums are must-see attractions for many people visiting new places and wanting to immerse themselves in a cultural and artistic atmosphere. Many museums are small but unique, displaying distinctive artifacts, while others are huge institutions that top most people’s travel list.
But which are the most visited museums in the world? The non-profit organization “Themed Entertainment Association” (TEA) has released its annual Visitorship Index for 2025, listing the top 20 most popular museums.
It’s not the famous people who make it to the top of the listLouvre Museum (Louvre), nor the Natural History Museum, London orVatican (Vatican), but from Beijingforbidden City archive.
The Palace Museum in Beijing, also known as the Forbidden City, was established 101 years ago and is a major collection of traditional Chinese art, cultural relics, and relics from the Ming and Qing dynasties. How many people come each year? According to the index, the number of tourists reached 19 million.
The Louvre is the highest-ranking tourist attraction outside China, ranking fourth with over 9 million visitors. The British Museum and the Palace of Versailles also made the top ten, along with London’s Natural History Museum, which was ranked seventh, and the Vatican, which was ranked eighth. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art ranked 17th with nearly 6 million visitors last year. Judging from this list, Asian regional museums clearly dominate.
In fact, Beijing’s Forbidden City is only one of 12 Chinese museums on the list, with Beijing’s Summer Palace and the Tomb Museum of Qin Shi Huang coming in second and third respectively.
1. Palace Museum in Beijing: 19 million visitors per year
2. Beijing Summer Palace: 17.381 million visitors
3. Xi’an Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Tomb Museum: 10.97 million visitors
4. Louvre Museum in Paris: 9.046 million visitors
5. Palace of Versailles, France: 8.4 million visitors
6. Shenzhen Nanshan Museum: 7.455 million visitors
7. Natural History Museum, London: 7.117 million visitors
8. Vatican Museums: 6.934 million visitors
