Musee Asiatica

One of the top five Asian art museums in Europe is hiding in a Basque surf town. Nobody expects this. You're walking through Biarritz thinking about waves and pintxos and suddenly there's a museum with over two thousand pieces spanning four thousand years of Asian art. It's genuinely one of the most surprising things in this city.

The museum was founded by Michel Postel and Xintian Zhu, who holds a PhD in East Asian Art from the Sorbonne. It officially opened in March nineteen ninety-nine. Postel spent decades collecting, and Zhu brought the academic rigour to turn a private collection into a world-class museum.

The collection that really stops you in your tracks is the Greco-Buddhist sculptures from Gandhara, which is now modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. These are sculptures of Buddha wearing what looks like a Roman toga. When Alexander the Great's armies reached the Indian subcontinent, Greek artistic traditions fused with Buddhist ones. The result is Buddha with curly Mediterranean hair and draped robes that look straight out of Rome. They're some of the most unusual art objects in any French museum, and they're here, in Biarritz.

There are also Chola-period Hindu bronzes from southern India, Hongshan jade pieces that are over five thousand years old, golden Nepalese bronzes, and Taoist art from China. The range is staggering for a museum this size.

The question everyone asks is why Biarritz? The answer is partly personal passion, partly the town's cosmopolitan history. Biarritz has always attracted people from everywhere. Russian aristocrats, British nobility, Spanish royalty, American surfers. A world-class Asian art museum fits the pattern, even if it sounds absurd at first. This town collects the unexpected.