Belau National Museum

The oldest museum in Micronesia, covering Palauan culture and the islands' colonial layers.

The Belau National Museum is the first stop for anyone trying to make sense of Palau. The collection is small but well chosen: storyboards carved from ironwood, traditional money beads, dance paddles, and exhibits explaining the matrilineal clan system that still organises Palauan society. A separate gallery covers the German, Japanese and American colonial periods in turn.

Outside, the rebuilt bai is worth a slow walk around. Its painted gables and lashed-timber construction follow the same plan as the meeting houses that once stood in every village, and the symbolic figures on the facade tell the founding stories of Palauan clans. An hour here will improve everything you see afterwards.

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A story
Founded in 1955, the Belau National Museum is the oldest museum in Micronesia. The traditional bai (men's meeting house) on the grounds, built in 1969 by master craftsmen using only traditional methods, burned down in 1978 — and was promptly rebuilt to the same specifications, an act of cultural restoration unusual in the region.