The Most Remarkable Museums in Asia

16 places in 9 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Terracotta Army

   People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   What makes the find keep giving up new detail is that no two soldiers are alike. Heads were sculpted separately from the mass-produced bodies, which let craftsmen vary hairstyle, facial features, ear shape and expression figure by figure across a workforce of thousands — more than 8,000 figures are believed to exist in total, of which just over 2,000 have been excavated from three pits so far, leaving an estimated 6,000 still underground.

   Did you know? Besides soldiers, the pits include about 130 chariots with 520 horses and some 150 cavalry horses.

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2. 02 Hagia Sophia

   Ayasofya

   Turkey · 1.1 km from Istanbul41.008° N 28.980° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The dome proved as fragile as it was bold. The original collapsed after an earthquake in 558, and Isidore the Younger rebuilt it about six metres higher and ribbed, so that its thrust would fall more steeply into the walls; later partial collapses were repaired in turn. The forty windows around its base make the dome seem to hover on a ring of light while also lightening its load. The interior is a layering of eras: marble revetment and columns of the sixth century, Byzantine gold mosaics of emperors, empresses, Christ and the Virgin, and the Ottoman fittings added after 1453, when Mehmed II converted the church into a mosque.

   Did you know? In 1054 a papal legate laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar here, a moment usually taken as the start of the East–West Schism.

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3. 03 Forbidden City

   People's Republic of China · 1.6 km from Beijing39.916° N 116.391° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The layout is a rectangle about 960 by 750 metres, surrounded by a moat 52 metres wide and a wall almost 8 metres high, with elaborate corner towers. Roughly 980 buildings survive, all laid out along the north-south axis that still structures central Beijing, running from Tiananmen through the palace to Jingshan Park. The southern half, the Outer Court, was the ceremonial stage: visitors enter through the Meridian Gate, cross a stream by one of five marble bridges and reach three great halls on a triple white marble terrace. The Hall of Supreme Harmony, the ceremonial centre of imperial power, is the largest surviving wooden building in China.

   Did you know? Only the Hall of Supreme Harmony was allowed ten guardian figures on its roof ridge, a privilege no other building in China had.

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4. 04 Topkapı Palace

   Turkey · 1 km from Istanbul41.013° N 28.984° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Topkapı is not one grand building but a sequence of courts, each more private than the last. The Imperial Gate leads into a broad outer court once open to the public; the Gate of Salutation admits you to the second court, where the vast kitchens — rebuilt by the architect Sinan after a fire in 1574 — now display one of the world's great collections of Chinese porcelain, some 10,700 pieces. Beyond the Gate of Felicity lies the inner palace, and beyond that the gardens and pavilions of the fourth court, including the Baghdad and Yerevan kiosks raised to celebrate military campaigns. Their walls are sheathed in Iznik tiles of blue, turquoise and green, the finest decoration in the palace.

   Did you know? It was originally called simply the New Palace; the name Topkapı, meaning Cannon Gate, was taken over centuries later from a seaside palace lost to fire.

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5. 05 Heydar Aliyev Center

   Azerbaijan · 0.6 km from Baku40.395° N 49.867° E

   

   The trick of the design is that the structure hides itself. A steel space frame working together with concrete cores carries the free-form skin, so the interior can open into vast column-free halls, and the cladding is made of almost 17,000 panels of glass-fibre-reinforced concrete and polyester, nearly every one of a different shape, their joints sweeping across the curves as fine lines. Inside, the same continuity carries on: floors become ramps, ceilings fall into walls, and the glazed fronts between the folds give long views across the park and toward the Caspian city.

   Did you know? The flowing structure houses eight floor levels beneath a roof that peaks at 74 metres, all wrapped in one continuous curving skin.

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6. 06 National Palace Museum

   Taiwan · 7.6 km from Taipei25.102° N 121.549° E

   

   The collection's journey is part of its story. The Palace Museum was founded in Beijing's Forbidden City on 10 October 1925, shortly after the last emperor, Puyi, was expelled from the palace. As the Japanese threat grew, the treasures were packed into crates and sent to Shanghai in 1933, then moved further west along several routes, staying ahead of the war until Japan's surrender in 1945. As the Chinese Civil War turned against the Nationalist government, its most prized pieces were shipped across the strait to Taiwan between December 1948 and February 1949: 2,972 crates, only about a fifth of those that had left Beijing, but chosen from the very best.

   Did you know? A tiny boat carved from an olive stone by Chen Zuzhang has opening windows, eight figures and a 300-character poem engraved on its underside.

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7. 07 National Museum of Qatar

   Qatar · 1.7 km from Doha25.288° N 51.549° E

   

   At the heart of the complex stands the restored early-20th-century palace once occupied by Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani, a former ruler of Qatar. The 1975 museum had already been built around it, and Nouvel's discs now curl around it in turn, so the old palace becomes the largest object in the collection. The galleries run in a continuous loop that tells the story of the peninsula in sequence: its natural history, Bedouin life in the desert, the history of its tribes, the emergence of the modern state and the transformation brought by oil. Outside, a lagoon displays traditional dhows and pearling equipment.

   Did you know? The palace complex grew piecemeal over decades with no master plan, gaining family residences, guard quarters and several majlis reception rooms.

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8. 08 Louvre Abu Dhabi

   United Arab Emirates · 8.1 km from Abu Dhabi24.533° N 54.400° E

   

   Beneath the dome, the museum is laid out like an Arab town rather than a single building. Some fifty-five low white blocks, twenty-three of them galleries, are separated by lanes and small plazas and edged by water, so that visitors move between rooms along shaded promenades. The dome itself, weighing thousands of tonnes, rests on just four supports hidden inside the pavilions and appears to float. It stands on the waterfront of Saadiyat Island, a man-made cultural district on the coast of the capital.

   Did you know? The dome weighs about 7,000 tonnes, yet its entire load is carried by just four concrete pillars concealed within the gallery buildings.

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9. 09 Peter and Paul Fortress

   Russia · 1 km from Saint Petersburg59.950° N 30.317° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Instead it became the state's most feared jail. From the early eighteenth century until the early 1920s the Trubetskoy Bastion held political prisoners, and during the revolutions of 1917 the fortress changed sides several times. In October 1917 its guns fired on the Winter Palace, and in January 1919 four grand dukes of the Romanov family were shot inside its walls. The fortress has been a museum since 1924 and is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the historic centre of Saint Petersburg.

   Did you know? Fyodor Dostoevsky spent about eight months in solitary confinement here in 1849 while awaiting trial as a member of a radical circle.

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10. 10 Hermitage Museum

    Russia · 0.1 km from Saint Petersburg59.941° N 30.314° E

    

    Today the core of the museum is a chain of buildings along Palace Embankment. The Winter Palace, the Romanovs' official residence, was built largely to designs by Bartolomeo Rastrelli in Elizabethan Baroque, its green-and-white main façade running about 215 metres; much of its interior was remade after a fire in 1837. Beside it come the Small Hermitage of Yury Felten and Vallin de la Mothe, the Old Hermitage, Klenze's New Hermitage, and the Hermitage Theatre. Across Palace Square, the eastern wing of the General Staff Building holds the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and twentieth-century art — Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Malevich.

    Did you know? In 1745 Empress Elizabeth ordered some thirty large mousers brought from Kazan to the Winter Palace, beginning the museum's long tradition of resident cats.

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11. 11 Museum of Islamic Art, Doha

    Qatar · 1.1 km from Doha25.295° N 51.539° E

    

    The setting is part of the design. The museum sits on an artificial peninsula near the old dhow harbour, surrounded by water on three sides, so that it reads from across the bay as a solitary sculpture against the sky. Pei chose a creamy limestone for the walls precisely because it changes through the day, pale and almost white at noon, honey-coloured in late light. The geometry is at its most striking at dusk, when the building glows against the darkening Gulf. The museum opened in 2008 and belongs to Qatar Museums.

    Did you know? The artificial island was created in 2003 and lies about 60 metres from the shore, linked to it by bridges.

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12. 12 Nukus Museum of Art

    Uzbekistan · 0.5 km from Nukus42.466° N 59.614° E

    

    Savitsky, a painter, archaeologist and collector born in Kyiv in 1915, first came to the region in 1950 with the Khorezm archaeological and ethnographic expedition led by Sergey Tolstov, and eventually settled in Nukus. He began by gathering Karakalpak jewellery, carpets, coins, clothing and other folk art, and the museum, founded in 1966 with Savitsky as its first curator, also holds finds from the ancient Khorezm fortresses. He went on to collect modern painting, seeking out banned artists and their heirs and buying canvases that had been hidden or forgotten, from Cubist, Futurist and Constructivist experiments to the vivid Central Asian scenes of the so-called Uzbek avant-garde.

    Did you know? The painter Vladimir Lysenko spent much of his life confined to a psychiatric hospital because of his art; his painting The Bull is now the museum's emblem.

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13. 13 Tokyo National Museum

    Japan · 4.3 km from Tokyo35.719° N 139.776° E

    

    The museum is really a campus of buildings from different eras. The Honkan, the main Japanese Gallery, is Jin Watanabe's "Imperial Crown" design: a concrete Western-style building under a heavy Japanese tiled roof, finished in 1938 after the Great Kantō earthquake destroyed Josiah Conder's earlier brick hall. Walk its two floors in order for a chronological sweep of Japanese art, with Buddhist sculpture, lacquer, swords, armour, screens and ink painting. Next to it the Hyōkeikan (1909), a domed, late-Meiji Western-style building, opens only for special exhibitions.

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14. 14 Teshima Art Museum

    Japan · 16.6 km from Takamatsu34.490° N 134.090° E

    

    Two large oval openings are cut into the shell, and through them come light, wind, birdsong and sometimes rain. Inside, the room is hushed. Rei Naito's work, Matrix, is almost invisible at first: water springs from the ground throughout the day, gathering into small pools and droplets that wander across the floor. Watching one drop make its way across the room can take a long time, and the space encourages exactly that kind of patience. The experience changes with the hour and the season, as the light through the openings moves and the sounds of the island drift in.

    Did you know? The concrete roof was poured in one continuous operation lasting nearly a day, so the shell has no construction joints anywhere.

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15. 15 Chichu Art Museum

    Japan · 12.9 km from Takamatsu34.450° N 133.986° E

    

    The museum was designed by Tadao Ando and opened on 18 July 2004 on the southern part of Naoshima, a small island in Kagawa Prefecture that the Benesse group and its foundation have turned into one of the world's best-known destinations for contemporary art. Ando built it mostly underground so as not to disturb the coastline, using his signature smooth concrete together with steel, glass and wood, and connected the galleries with corridors, ramps and open-air courts where only the sky is visible. Rather than housing a changing collection, the building was conceived around the specific works it holds, so that architecture and art form a single experience.

    Did you know? The museum grew out of the purchase of Monet's six-metre Water-Lily Pond, a work from the same late series as the great panels in the Orangerie in Paris.

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16. 16 Adachi Museum of Art

    Japan · 15.1 km from Matsue35.380° N 133.194° E

    

    Each garden has its own character. The Dry Landscape Garden sets three upright stones, read as mountains, in raked white sand; the Moss Garden is a sweep of cedar moss in soft curves under red pines planted at a slant, as if growing wild on a slope; the White Gravel and Pine Garden takes its composition from a painting by Yokoyama Taikan, with pines arranged over undulating white sand. A Pond Garden with a teahouse and koi completes the sequence, while on the wooded hill beyond falls the Kikaku waterfall, about fifteen metres high, made in homage to Taikan's painting of the Nachi falls. Gardeners tend the grounds every day, and the precision shows everywhere.

    Did you know? The collection holds about 120 works by Yokoyama Taikan, one of the most important groups of his paintings in Japan.

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