China’s museum boom, take two

Niko wang, a man in his 30s with thick black glasses, has his own marketing business. This affords him the flexibility to go to museums during the week—an essential ability for culture vultures in China. Its big museums have become almost too crowded to visit on weekends and holidays. On a recent Thursday morning at a new branch of the Zhejiang provincial museum in Hangzhou he pointed to a digital sign indicating that there were just 400 people in the museum at that moment, well below capacity. “What a treat!” Mr Wang said. Booking entries for China’s most popular museums, he sighed, is now almost as difficult as buying train seats during the annual crush for the Lunar New Year. You need to be logged onto the museums’ apps, with a fast trigger finger, as soon as tickets become available.