Visitors explore the preview event for the On Top of the Pyramid: The Civilization of Ancient Egypt exhibition at the Shanghai Museum. Photo: Chen Xia/GT

In the early hours of Monday morning, people lined up outside the Shanghai Museum as the institution kicked off an event that would see its doors remain open for 168 hours for the final week of the blockbuster exhibition On Top of the Pyramid: The Civilization of Ancient Egypt.

The unprecedented week-long "museum sleepless night" marathon, which began on Sunday night as the clock turned to midnight, will keep the museum's gate open for seven straight days and nights until the exhibition closes on August 17. 

The late-night discounted tickets were priced at 74 yuan ($10.30), half the regular admission price. Each nightly session - midnight to 6 am - has 3,000 tickets available, according to the museum.

The late-night debut session sold out all 3,000 tickets in advance, Shanghai-based media outlet thepaper.cn reported. Despite the unusual hours, crowds remained steady. Visitors like Su Jie, 29, saw it as a rare chance to watch the exhibition.

"I knew the exhibition had been running for a long time in Shanghai but heard it was packed," Su told the Global Times. "I thought the night session would be less crowded, plus it was half-price and the last week, so I decided to go." Arriving at 5 am, she noted many families with children were also attending.

Bin Cai, 40, decided to visit for the same reason as Su. He told the Global Times that the exhibition had been crowded throughout its run, but with it ending soon, he felt compelled to see it. Despite arriving at midnight, he found the line outside the museum was considerably long. 

Drawn by the museum's WeChat promotional efforts, Shan Weile, 31, waited about 20 to 30 minutes to enter the museum. She noted that she liked the "sleepless night" concept. 

"I never experience this kind of nighttime opening before and think it's novel, similar to a Night at the Museum event," said Shan.

"It was still crowded when watching the exhibits," Shan told the Global Times, adding that the cat mummies in one exhibition zone, some displayed outside Egypt for the first time, were a highlight for her.

Before visiting the exhibition, she even wore nail stickers featuring ancient Egyptian motifs to express her connection to the show in her own way, Shan noted.

The exhibition, which has run for 13 months, has already drawn more than 2.6 million visitors as of July 28. The final tally is expected to surpass 2.7 million. The Egyptian exhibition has seen nearly 70 percent of its visitors come from outside the city,  and more than 70 percent of those visitors traveled specifically to see the special exhibition, according to the museum.

Bin told the Global Times that as a sculptor, he paid special attention to the craftsmanship on display at the exhibit. He was amazed by the level of skill displayed in the carvings from thousands of years ago.

Co-hosted by the Shanghai Museum and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, the exhibition features 788 artifacts from Egypt, including many unearthed at the site of the Bubasteion of Saqqara in Egypt, which was dedicated to the cat goddess Bastet. It also includes dozens of ancient Chinese artifacts to create a dialogue between the two millennia-old civilizations.

The exhibition previously made headlines with its innovative arrangements, including night events that invited audiences to bring pet cats, as well as a best-selling parallel virtual reality (VR) experience presenting the Pyramid of Khufu, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Chu Xiaobo, curator of the Shanghai Museum, described the exhibition as an important cultural exchange program between China and Egypt, praising it as one of the world's most remarkable "super exhibitions" in recent years.