Chinese museums now dominate the global attendance rankings, taking 12 of the top 20 places in the 2025 TEA Global Experience Index, in a shift that underlines how far the centre of gravity in the museum world has moved east. The Palace Museum in Beijing leads the list with 19 million visitors, followed by the Summer Palace, also in Beijing, with 17.38 million, and the museum of the Terracotta Army in Xi'an with 10.9 million.

The figures put China's largest institutions far ahead of their European counterparts. The Louvre in Paris, long the world's most visited museum, ranks fourth with 9.05 million visitors, while Versailles is fifth with 8.4 million. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, at 5.98 million visitors, places 17th and is the only North American museum in the top 20.

The surge reflects years of investment in new buildings and free-admission policies across China, alongside a domestic tourism boom that has made museum visiting a mass activity. Many of the Chinese institutions on the list combine vast historic collections with the kind of blockbuster scale that draws tens of thousands of visitors a day.

The rankings are likely to sharpen a debate about what attendance figures actually measure. European and American directors have argued that visitor numbers say little about the quality of the experience, while Chinese officials point to the figures as evidence that museums there have become central to public life. Either way, the balance of the world's museum-going public has tilted decisively toward China.