Museum of Asian Art

The Museum of Asian Art occupies the Palace of Saint Michael and Saint George, a neoclassical building on the north side of the Esplanade built by the British in 1819 as the residence of the Lord High Commissioner. The museum houses one of the most important collections of Asian art in Europe: over 15,000 objects from China, Japan, Korea, Cambodia, India, Tibet, Nepal, and Thailand.

The quality of individual pieces is remarkable — Tang dynasty pottery, Song porcelain, Japanese lacquerware, Tibetan thangkas, Indian bronzes. The palace itself is worth seeing: the entrance hall with its classical colonnade, the decorated state rooms, and the views over the Esplanade from the upper floors. The combination of a neoclassical British colonial building with a world-class Asian art collection is very Corfu.

things to do museum
A story
The collection of Asian art in Corfu was assembled by two Corfiot diplomats — Gregorios Manos and Nikolaos Chadjivasiliou — in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during postings to China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. The fact that two men from a small Greek island managed to assemble over 15,000 pieces of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Tibetan art, now displayed in a neoclassical palace, is one of the more improbable stories in European museum history.