Map - Museum of Asian Art (Museum of Asian Art)

The Museum of Asian Art (Museum für Asiatische Kunst) is a part of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin since 2020. Before its relocation it was sited in the neighborhood of the borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Berlin, Germany. It is one of the Berlin State Museums institutions and is funded by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. It houses some 20,000 Asian artifacts, making it one of the largest museums of ancient Asian art in the world. The museum is located in the same building as the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. The museum houses important collections of Art houses of South, Southeast and Central Asian countries and art from the Indo-Asian cultural area, from the 4th millennium BC to the present. Its geographic reach covers regions in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Autonomous Region of Tibet and Xinjiang of the People's Republic of China, the Southeast Asian countries of Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and also the Indonesian Islands or archipelago.

The collection originally belonged to the Ethnological Museum of Berlin founded in 1873. From 1904 it was known as the "Indian Department". On November 8, 1906, by government decree, Wilhelm von Bode, director-general of the Royal Museums of Berlin, founded the collection of the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin. Germany's oldest museum of its kind, it was first located on Museum Island.

As a result of the four German Turfan expeditions, from 1902 to 1914, the collection was expanded to include Central Asia. In 1924, the exhibition was moved into the building belonging to the Arts and Crafts Museum, which at that time was also home to the Museum of Pre- and Early History (since 1981, it has been known as Martin-Gropius-Bau). The Society for East Asian Art founded in 1926 has provided substantial support for the museum's work. Thanks to their consistent expansion until the Second World War, the collections were among the most important in the world.

During the Second World War, there were regrettable losses, partly due to damage to the museum building and partly to the removal of a large number of artifacts to Russia. After the war, the Red Army took about 90 percent of the distributed collections to the Soviet Union as war booty. There they were taken to the Hermitage in St Petersburg where they have remained until today. Only a few pieces were returned to Berlin. The almost complete loss necessitated recreating the collection but this could only be achieved gradually. From 1952, it was the Pergamon Museum that exhibited East Asian Art. At the instigation of the first director, Herbert Härtel, the collections were presented as part of an independent "Indian Art Department", later called the "Museum of Indian Art" (from 1 January 1963 to 4 December 2006).

After the Berlin Wall went up, it was decided in 1970 to build new exhibition premises in West Berlin in the Zehlendorf district. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, efforts were made to reorganize Berlin's museum scene. In 1992, the two separate collections were brought together in Dahlem. The Association of Friends of the Department, the Society of Indo-Asian Art Berlin eV, was founded in 1993. It publishes the annual Indo-Asiatische Zeitschrift ("Indo-Asian Journal"). In 2000, they were extended, forming until 2006 the Museum of East Asian Art, which now continues as the East Asian Art Collection at the Museum of Asian Art, since December 2006