State Museum of Oriental Art

About museum

The State Museum of Oriental Art is one of the oldest museums of its kind in the world, founded in 1918. It houses paintings, works on paper, sculptures, decorative and applied arts, and archaeological exhibits from more than a hundred countries. In the five years following the revolution, collections from the National Museum, the Stroganov School, carpet and antique shops, the warehouses of the 'Northern Company', and other museums were added. Today you can see ancient Chinese ceramics and traditional ritual items from Buryatia, as well as masterpieces of global significance, such as a 17th-century pile silk carpet from India and a contemporary wool carpet from Afghanistan. The exhibition halls, or groups of halls, are dedicated to individual countries and regions of the East, from Iran to Kazakhstan. In the museum one can sense how time passes differently in the East and how design has changed little over millennia.