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Collecions

SOUTHEAST ASIA

The Museum’s Southeast Asia collection currently comprises over 3,000 items from Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Males, Singapore, the Philippines, and East Timur. It was started in 1976 when the Nusantra Archipelago Museum expanded its focus to the whole of Asia and the Pacific. One of our first acquisitions from outside of Indonesia hailed from Laos and were gifted to the Museum by the then

premier of the country, Prince Souvanna Phouma. The collection was built up through purchases in the course of the 1970s and 1980s as well as gifts from private collectors. The Vietnamese and Myanmar holdings are the richest and most interesting. The Vietnamese collection was started earlier, mostly through purchases made in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of Poland’s burgeoning cultural cooperation with Vietnam. A recent addition to the collection is a valuable set of historic ceramics which originally belonged to Tadeusz and Krzysztof Findziński. As for the Myanmar artefacts held by the Museum, practically all of them were acquired by its director Andrzej Wawrzyniak between 2007 and 2008. They are mostly sculptures, architectural details, and other objects linked to Buddhist practices and local religions. The other Southwest Asian nations have a smaller representation, yet the exhibits, even if less numerous, still reflect the richness of the region’s cultural heritage.