No. 93 Courtyard Museum
Photo: wikimedia — CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Located in the historic Liulichang-Dashilan area, No. 93 Courtyard Museum is a cultural hub that preserves and promotes traditional Chinese arts. Housed in a renovated courtyard, it offers exhibitions on folk art, traditional crafts, and intangible cultural heritage, providing visitors with an immersive experience into Beijing’s rich cultural history.
Planning your visit
No. 93 Courtyard Museum sits in the Dashilan and Liulichang area south of Tiananmen — historically the district of booksellers, ink and brush shops, opera houses and craftsmen, and one of the few parts of old Beijing where the hutong fabric survives in usable condition.
The museum occupies a restored siheyuan courtyard house and is devoted to intangible cultural heritage: the crafts and performing traditions that have official protected status in China. Rather than displaying objects behind glass, it hosts working practitioners — paper cutting, kite making, inside-painted snuff bottles, dough figurines, shadow puppetry, Peking opera face painting — and visitors can watch and often attempt the techniques.
The courtyard architecture is itself the point for many visitors: a chance to see how a traditional Beijing house is organised around its central space, which is impossible to grasp from the alleys outside.
Bookable options are hutong walking tours that include the museum, which is the sensible format — the surrounding lanes are the context that makes the crafts legible. Current availability is shown below.
Before you book
Where is No. 93 Courtyard Museum?
No. 93 Courtyard Museum is in Beijing, China.
Do I need to book No. 93 Courtyard Museum in advance?
Guided tours run to a fixed schedule and small group sizes, so they are usually booked ahead.
