Monday is the first free admission day for four museums in Shanghai, which have all seen several times more visitors than usual. In addition to accommodating the increasing number of visitors, how to provide qualified service is also the top priority for these cultural facilities.

Our Shanghai correspondent Zhou Jing takes a closer look.

Reporter:

In front of the Shanghai Museum, one of the four facilities offering free entry, visitors started to queue hours before its opening on Monday morning. Among them was Mr. Xu who set off from his home in Pudong at 7:30 am. Xu said he spent 20 yuan to visit the museum when it first opened in 1996. But this time, instead of buying a ticket, he got a free one.

"The elimination of the entry fee is a big step forward."

Learning from the previous experiments in some museums where tides of culture-hungry visitors caused chaos on free entry days, Shanghai Museum set the number of daily visitors at 5,000.

However, the museum saw an influx of over 6,000 visitors on Monday, six times that of on an ordinary workday. The other three facilities, the Site-Memorial of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Luxun Museum and the Former Residence of Chen Yun have also reported surges of visitors on the first free entry day.

In its drive to give tax payers better access to high culture, Chinese culture authorities have vowed to open up 500 public museums and memorial halls free to visitors this year. Funding is provided by both the central and local governments to these facilities to support their operating expenses.

However, without follow-up services, the effect of the free entry initiative is crippled. Here is a visitor.

"I learned almost nothing without professional guides."

Chen Xiejun, curator at Shanghai Museum, points out…

"Offering free entry is just the beginning of a move that aims to fully realize the values of the cultural facilities in China. After that, it's upon the facilities to come out with better shows and better service to truly benefit the visitors."

For the free entry, the Shanghai Museum have prepared more electronic interpreters for visitors from home and abroad and organized over 40 volunteers to provide free on-the-spot explanation.

The museum is also actively contacting foreign counterparts, hoping to bring more high-quality exhibits to local cultural lovers.

Zhou Jing, CRI News, Shanghai.