On place d’Iéna, five minutes up from the Seine, is the museum a Lyon industrialist built for himself because he wanted to understand the religions of Asia and books were not enough. The money came from the artificial ultramarine blue his father had invented, and which is still called Guimet blue. The Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet is the largest collection of Asian art outside Asia, and it divides its rooms into eleven geographical sections, from Afghanistan to Japan.
The museum closes on Tuesdays, like the three museums of the Palais de Chaillot five minutes up the hill. And the Maison Guimet, the small palace across the street with the Panthéon bouddhique and the Japanese garden, can no longer be visited freely: you get in only on a guided tour, booked in advance, while almost every page you will find online still calls it free entry.
Why did a maker of pigments put together the largest collection of Asian art outside Asia?
Let’s begin!
1. The Khmer gallery, which is the first thing you see
You walk in and find a grey room full of sandstone figures on white plinths, with a carved pediment mounted high on the far wall. This is not storage on show: it is the room the museum uses as its calling card, and it is worth crossing slowly.
These stones were not bought by Émile Guimet (1836-1918), who took over the family firm at twenty-four and ran it until he died. They come from the Musée indochinois du Trocadéro: from the casts and fragments Louis Delaporte brought back from his campaigns in Cambodia between 1878 and 1925, and they were moved here when that museum closed. Keep it in mind as you walk: you are looking at the Angkor that nineteenth-century Europe took home, and that verb weighs as much as the stones.
2. The head of Jayavarman VII, a king who had himself portrayed without a crown
How do you recognise a king with no crown and no jewels?
You do not, and that is the point. This sandstone head, forty-two centimetres high, is the portrait of Jayavarman VII, who ruled the Khmer empire from 1181 to 1218 and had Angkor Thom and the Bayon built.
Get close and look at what his sculptor took away. No diadem, no earrings, no insignia: the hair is rendered in fine incised lines over the skull, the eyes are closed, the lips full with a hint of a smile, the neck snapped clean. This is the Bayon style, of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, and it is the moment when Khmer sculpture stops carving young, perfect faces and starts carving the faces of people. A ruler who has himself portrayed with lowered eyes, with the filled-out face of middle age, is saying something precise about power.
3. The Banteay Srei pediment, and the two brothers who kill each other over a woman
A little further along, on the wall, is a pink sandstone pediment from Banteay Srei, the temple with the reputation for the finest carving at Angkor, consecrated around 967 under the reign of Jayavarman V.
Read the scene from left to right. Two men raise their clubs, one on each side, and between them a woman stands, calm, one hand on her hip; below, four seated figures watch, and at the top two small flying figures chase each other through the foliage. They are Sunda and Upasunda, the invincible brothers of the Mahābhārata, who having secured that no one could kill them then slaughter each other over a nymph sent in on purpose to set them against one another. Look at the depth of the carving, which here lifts the figures clear of the ground. Banteay Srei does mean «citadel of women» in Khmer, but it is a modern name, and the explanation that goes round, that work this fine could only have come from a woman’s hand, is a legend grown on top of the name. The old name was Tribhuvanamaheśvara, and the temple is the only major sanctuary at Angkor that was not built for a king: it was commissioned by Yajnyavaraha, a counsellor of Rajendravarman.
4. The Gandhāra bodhisattva, where the drapery is Roman
What happens when Greek art reaches the foothills of the Himalayas?
This happens. The figure stands upright, the right hand raised in the gesture of reassurance, a round halo behind the head and a fold of cloth running down from the shoulder in deep parallel grooves.
Stop on the face first and then on the drapery. The bodhisattva has a moustache, a straight nose and hair gathered in a knot held by a clasp, and his cloak falls exactly as a toga falls on a Roman statue. The resemblance is not accidental: Gandhāra, the region straddling today’s Afghanistan and Pakistan, lay on the road that linked the Mediterranean to India, and its sculptors gave the Buddha the body and the folds of Hellenistic art. Along the base runs a row of tiny figures, and that is where you realise how large the rest is.
5. The nanban screen, or Europe seen from Japan
Go up and look for it, because it is the object that amuses me most in the whole museum. It is a six-panel folding screen from the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Kano school, ink and colours on paper with gold leaf, 153 centimetres high and 361 long. Émile Guimet gave it himself, before 1880.
Look at it from the left: there is a Portuguese ship at anchor, men hanging in the rigging and crates on deck. In the centre a procession comes ashore, with a caparisoned horse and porters in wide coloured breeches. On the right, in front of a building with a veranda, several figures dressed entirely in black: they are the Jesuits. Nanban means «southern barbarians», and it is the name the Japanese gave the Portuguese who arrived from that sea, and the reversal is the whole point: for once it is not us painting Asia, it is Asia painting us, and putting us in baggy trousers.
6. The Maison Guimet, which is no longer visited the way you think
This section saves you a mistake. Across avenue d’Iéna stands the hôtel d’Heidelbach, now called the Maison Guimet, with the Panthéon bouddhique and a Japanese garden: for years it was the free entry that everyone recommended.
You now get in only on a guided tour, booked in advance, on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays at 11:00, plus Sundays at 14:30 from 11 October to 20 December 2026, and the tour also gives access to the main museum’s collections. The third site, the Musée d’Ennery, is closed for restoration until 2028. Book before you travel, or you will stand in front of a closed door convinced you have the wrong address.
Practical information
Details checked on 25 September 2026 on the official site guimet.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The full price is 15 euros and covers the permanent collections and the temporary exhibitions. The reduced price is 12 euros and applies to members of museum-friends associations, holders of the large-family card and AFAO members. Free admission. Under-18s get in free, as do EU residents aged 18 to 25, jobseekers, people on minimum social benefits, disabled visitors with their companion, Pass Education holders and ICOM members. The museum is free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month. Opening hours. The museum opens every day except Tuesday, from 10:00 to 18:00. The ticket office closes at 17:15 and the last entry is at 17:30. Closing days. It closes on Tuesdays, plus 1 January, 1 May, 14 July and 25 December. Paris Museum Pass. The museum accepts it, so with the pass you do not pay the 15 euros. Getting there. The entrance is at 6 place d’Iéna. The stop is Iéna on line 9, in front of the museum, and Boissière, also on line 9, is five minutes away. How long it takes. The six stops need an hour and a half, and anyone who also stops in the Chinese and Japanese rooms easily reaches three hours.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The popular and minority arts of Asia, which this museum leaves out by choice, are at the Musée du quai Branly, ten minutes on foot along the Seine. On the hill of the Trocadéro, five minutes further up, three museums share one building: the Cité de l’architecture, the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée national de la Marine. And if the Japanese garden of the Maison Guimet has caught your interest, the large one in Paris is at the Albert-Kahn museum, and I write about it in the Japanese garden of Paris.
Photo credits: South-East Asia gallery by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0); head of Jayavarman VII by Miguel Hermoso Cuesta (CC BY-SA 4.0); Banteay Srei pediment by Sailko (CC BY-SA 3.0); Gandhāra bodhisattva by Ninara (CC BY 2.0); nanban screen by Faqscl (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
