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Guimet Museum

Oriental Treasures in Paris

Guimet Museum in Paris has a collection of Asian artworks from China, India, Japan, Southeast Asia, and other regions. Its collection covers different categories such as bronzes, ceramics, stone carvings, paintings and calligraphy, etc.

Guimet Museum in Paris, France, is one of the museums in the Western world that collects the largest number and highest standard of Asian artworks.

The Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts, Musée national des arts asiatiques-Guimet (MNAAG), or Guimet Museum for short, was founded by Emile Guimet, an industrialist from Lyon, France. The museum started with his private collection and then consolidated a large number of Asian artworks from the Louvre and private donations to become what it is today.

The Guimet Museum is divided into several display spaces depending on the origin of the exhibits, with the Chinese collection being the most notable. Almost every floor of the museum contains artworks from China, including Chinese Bronzes, Chinese Ceramics, Chinese Stone Carvings, and Chinese painting and calligraphy, among other different categories. A life-size Liao Dynasty Three-color Glazed Luohan Statue unearthed in Yi County, Hebei, China, is a treasure of the Museum.

Manywhere Trivia:
This tri-colored Luohan is not alone, it’s one of a total of 16, which were smuggled out of the country in the early 20th century, 10 of them are scattered around the world in the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but none in China.

The museum also has Angkor Wat and Siamese statues from Southeast Asia, Noh masks, Ukiyo-e, and Samurai armors from Japan, religious carvings from Indian Region, paintings and furniture from the Korean region, and Thangka mandala and Tibetan Buddhist statues from the Himalayan region of Tibet (China) and Nepal.

Ancient Asian civilizations have played an important role in history and are mysterious and fascinating to Westerners, and the Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts is the perfect place to experience this exotic culture of the East.