The Musée Guimet was the brain-child of Emile Guimet (1836-1918), a Lyons industrialist who devised the grand project of opening a museum devoted to the religions of Ancient Egypt, Classical Antiquity, and Asia. Guimet visited Egypt and Greece before traveling around the world in 1876, stopping off in Japan, China and India. In the course of his travels he acquired extensive collections of objects which he put on display in a museum opened in Lyon in 1879.

These collections were subsequently transferred to a new museum which he had built in Paris and which was inaugurated ten years later, in 1899. During Emile Guimet's own lifetime, the museum, while maintaining a section devoted to the religions of Ancient Egypt, increasingly focused on Asian civilizations.

From 1945, within the framework of a massive reorganization of the French national collections, the Musée Guimet transferred its Egyptian pieces to the Louvre and, in return, received the entire collection of objects from the latter museum's Department of Asian Arts.

view the official website for the Guimet Museum.