Following a mission to the Peshawar district on the Indo-Afghan frontier, Alfred Foucher brought back some 100 pieces, including the famous "Foucher" bodhisattva (AO 2907), which were exhibited in the Louvre in 1900.

Himalayan art has featured at the Musée Guimet since the museum was founded in Lyon in 1879, when a small series of Lamaist objects were on display. Today, the Himalayan collection includes some 1600 pieces.

The South East Asia Department was a result of a merger between two major collections of Khmer art, between 1927 and 1931: the old Musée Emile Guimet collection -with the series of Cambodian artefacts built up by Etienne Aymonier (1844-1929)- and the collection of the Trocadéro Musée Indochinois of which Louis Delaporte (1842-1925) had been the founder and curator.

The importance of Central Asia (also known as Serindia) was revealed in the early 20^th century by archeological discoveries that brought to light the outstanding Buddhist heritage along the route of the Silk Road. Unique documents, including manuscripts and major cycles of Buddhist religious imagery, had been conserved thanks to the desert climate, favourable to the preservation of organic material.

The Chinese Department of the Musée Guimet includes some 20 000 objects covering seven millennia of Chinese art, from the earliest times up until the 18^th century.The archeological section opens with jades and ceramics from the Neolithic period and continues with major bronze works from the Shang and Zhou dynasties.

The creation of the Korean Department dates back to the Varat Mission, undertaken in 1888 with the assistance of Collin de Plancy, a French diplomat at the Seoul court. Thanks to its acquisition of a highly eclectic collection of objects, this mission revealed to the public for the very first time a country that had previously been closed to foreigners.

The Indian section in the Musée Guimet includes, on the one hand, terracotta, stone, bronze and wood sculptures ranging from the 3^rd millennium BC to the 18^th/19^th centuries AD, and, on the other, paintings and miniatures from the 15^th to 19^th centuries.

The Japanese Department collections include some 11000 works, offering an extremely rich and diversified panorama of Japanese art since its origins during the 3^rd and 2^nd millennia BC up until the beginning of the Meiji era (1868).

The library, established when the museum was opened in 1889, specializes in the ancient art and archeology of East and Far Eastern Asia. Its collection of over 100,000 volumes includes books and revues in all European and Asian languages together with 1500 periodicals.

The museum’s Photographic Archives was set up in 1920 by Victor Goloubew (1878-1945). It consists of a major collection specializing in Asian art and archeology, and also includes numerous ethnographic collections covering the latter half of the 19^th century.