The French Museum Guimet has a love affair with Chinese treasures.
The Guimet Museum of Asian Arts has collected more than twenty thousand Chinese artworks, ranging from artifacts and sculptures to decorations. The collection includes jade articles from the Neolithic period, bronze wares and mirrors, ancient coins and lacquers from Shang (About1600-1100BC) and Zhou (About1100-221BC) Dynasties as well as Buddhist artworks, over ten thousand of porcelains and collections from Han (206BC-AD220) and Tang (618-907) Dynasties. Furthermore, thousands of paintings spanning from Tang Dynasty to Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) have also been collected by the museum.
The Chinese exhibition hall in the Guimet Museum is divided into three parts: primitive China, classical China and Buddhism in China. The Chinese cultural relics from along Silk Road, brought back by Paul Pelliot, are another highlight of the museum, totaling 220 volumes of painting, 21 pieces of woodcarving, numerous of textiles and silks.
Paintings of Bodhisattva and Buddha reflect the great influence of Tang Dynasty’s art and culture on Buddhism.
A quarter of the cultural relics obtained by Paul Pelliot are statues of Kuan-yin (a Bodhisattva), among which the most special one is “Water-moon Kuan Yin”, a coloured drawing of Five Dynasties (907-960), gathering different cultural elements especially the Central Asian art.
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