Guimet Museum

Step in from the traffic of Place d'Iéna and the noise drops away. The light changes first. It falls soft and pale through high windows onto grey sandstone, and the stone is cool even on a warm Paris afternoon. Somewhere ahead, a Buddha sits with half-closed eyes. You are in the Guimet Museum, France's national museum of Asian arts. It holds one of the largest collections of Asian art outside Asia, gathered in one building at the edge of the sixteenth arrondissement.

The museum begins with one man and his questions. Émile Guimet was an industrialist from Lyon. His family fortune came from a synthetic blue dye used in laundry and paint. He did not want only to make money. He wanted to understand how people in other cultures prayed. In 1876 he set off on a long journey around the world. He travelled through Japan, China and India, and he bought objects, books and images wherever he went.

Guimet's first museum opened in Lyon in 1879. Its subject was religion. It was not a collection of beautiful things for their own sake. Statues, ritual objects and sacred texts were meant to sit side by side, so that scholars could compare beliefs across continents. Lyon was too far from the academic life of the capital. So Guimet moved his collection to Paris, and this building opened in 1889, the same year the Eiffel Tower rose just across the river.

Look at the building from outside before you go too deep. The corner is a rounded tower that faces the square. Inside that curve sits the old library, a circular room lined with wooden shelves and ringed by columns. Here is a surprise most visitors never hear. In 1905 a young dancer gave one of her first Paris performances in this library. She called herself Mata Hari. Later she became one of the most famous spies of the First World War.

The museum you walk through today is not quite the museum Guimet built. In the middle of the twentieth century, France's national collections were reorganised. The Guimet sent much of its Egyptian material to the Louvre. In return, the Louvre's Asian collections came here. The Guimet stopped being a museum of religions and became a museum of Asian art. The building then went through a long renovation and reopened in 2001. That renovation gave it the open, light-filled galleries you see today.

The heart of the ground floor belongs to Cambodia. These are sculptures from the Khmer empire, the civilisation that built Angkor in the medieval period. Many pieces arrived in France in the late nineteenth century through French expeditions in what was then colonial Indochina. Stand in front of the large stone figures and notice how calm the faces are. The lips curve in a small, closed smile. That smile appears again and again in Khmer art.

Watch for the serpents. In Khmer temples, the naga, a sacred many-headed snake, often guards bridges and causeways. Here you can see these creatures up close, their heads fanned out like an open hand. Their bodies once ran along stone balustrades at temple entrances. In a museum it is easy to forget their size. Imagine them stretched out along a road toward a temple, with pilgrims walking beside them in the heat.

It is worth slowing down for a quiet head with lowered eyes. Many scholars identify portraits like this with Jayavarman the Seventh, one of the great Khmer kings. He ruled at the end of the twelfth century and was a devoted Buddhist. The face is not a stern ruler's face. It looks inward, almost asleep. For many visitors, this is the most human moment in the whole museum. It is a king shown in meditation, not in power.

Move on to the galleries of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the mood changes. This is the art of Gandhara, an ancient region where Greek influence from the time of Alexander's successors met Buddhist India. Look at the Buddhas here. The robes fall in deep folds like Greek or Roman statues. The hair waves. The faces sometimes look almost Mediterranean. It is one of the clearest places in the world to see two artistic traditions meeting in stone.

Nearby are carved ivories and small treasures found at Begram, in Afghanistan, during French excavations in the twentieth century. They tell a story of trade. Objects from India, China and the Roman world were found together. They show that goods once travelled great distances along the routes we now call the Silk Road. Because so much heritage in Afghanistan has suffered from war, pieces like these carry extra weight. Some exist safely in only a handful of museums.

Upstairs, the collections move east and north. China fills several rooms with bronzes, jades, paintings and a long line of ceramics. You can follow the history of porcelain from simple pale glazes to bright painted wares. Then come Korea, Japan, Tibet, Nepal and the lands of Southeast Asia. The galleries are arranged by region. That makes the visit feel like a slow journey across a continent, floor by floor, one culture opening into the next.

Here is one more detail many visitors miss. The Guimet has a second address a short walk away along avenue d'Iéna. It is a nineteenth-century mansion called the Hôtel d'Heidelbach. Inside is a Buddhist pantheon, a quieter collection of Japanese and Chinese religious art. Behind it lies a small Japanese garden with bamboo, stone and water. Guimet's original dream of a museum about faith survives most clearly there, away from the larger crowds.

Before you leave, go back to the rounded corner and stand for a moment near the entrance. Outside, cars circle the square, and the Eiffel Tower is only minutes away across the Seine. In here, a stone king still meditates and serpents still guard a road that is no longer there. As you step back into the street, notice the sound of the city returning. Guimet travelled the world to collect this calm. You carry a little of it with you.