An exhibition featuring nearly 200 important artefacts from Beijing's Old Summer Palace opens to the public at the Hong Kong Palace Museum from Wednesday.

Some of these items are making their first appearance outside the mainland.

The special exhibition on imperial China will be open until the middle of August, with tickets for adults priced at HK$150 while concession ones are half that.

On display include paintings and calligraphies as well as architecture models from the Qing Dynasty.

One masterpiece the museum highlighted is the "Consort of the Qianlong Emperor and Yongyan", a 3.5-metre-tall piece of the emperor and his son, who later became the Jiaqing Emperor.

The item used to be erected on a wall of the palace, also known as Yuanmingyuan.

"It's very hard to get [the relics] out from Beijing because you need to protect them. As you can see, they're quite delicate with all those details," Hong Kong Palace Museum’s assistant curator Rachel Leung, told RTHK on Tuesday.

"The other thing is they can really tell you the level of craftsmanship back then in the Qing Dynasty and how the process of constructing a building was like."

She said the museum understands that visitors may not have a full understanding of Qing history, and so several multimedia pieces have been put in place for people to visualise how the palace actually looked like.