Musée Guimet
The Musée Guimet in Paris holds one of the largest collections of Asian art outside Asia itself. Its galleries gather works from Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Tibet, India and Nepal, alongside Chinese and Japanese porcelain. Objects tied to the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome round out the holdings. In the Panthéon Bouddhique you find a wing given over to Buddhist art alone.
The French minister of public instruction sent the industrialist Émile Étienne Guimet to study the religions of the Far East. An avid traveller, he turned his journeys into a museum: it opened in Lyon in 1879 and moved to Paris in 1889. Exhibitions borrowed from the Kabul Museum have brought finds from Ai-Khanoum, a Greco-Bactrian city, and the Indo-Scythian treasure of Tillia Tepe.
The Khmer pieces carry their own history: early scholars such as Louis Delaporte and Etienne Aymonier brought them to France. They travelled with the King of Cambodia's agreement, meant to show Europe how far ancient Khmer culture had reached.
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