Ethnographic collections from Asia have typically been curated within the Museum’s Asia Division (initially known as the “Division of the Orient”). Today, they consist of several thousand objects.
Major collections include:
• The Koelz Collection of South Asian textiles and Himalayan material culture, collected in the region in the early 1930s
• The Eugene Power collection of Balinese wooden sculpture
• The Bartlett Collection of Batak manuscripts and objects from Sumatra
• The Chinese Government Collection of clothing, jewelry, household ornaments, calligraphy, and other objects exhibited in the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition held in New Orleans in 1884
