Hong Kong Palace Museum

When architect Rocco Yim reimagined Beijing’s Forbidden City for modern Hong Kong, he flipped its famous horizontal axis vertical, stacking three atriums like courtyards in the sky. The result houses over 900 artifacts loaned from Beijing, including 160 national treasures, some displayed publicly for the first time. An undulating bronze ceiling winds through the building’s full height, echoing the golden roofs of the imperial palace while flooding galleries with natural light, a contemporary translation of sequential courtyards for a city built upward, not outward.

The museum’s arrival was not quiet. Hong Kong’s government struck the deal with Beijing behind closed doors in December 2016, and the announcement landed without any public consultation, triggering a political storm that dogged its chief backer through her subsequent run for the city’s top job. The building that emerged from that controversy now draws visitors who queue for a very different reason: to see, in some cases, artifacts that have never left the Forbidden City’s walls before, arranged inside a structure built to turn a horizontal empire vertical.