Bihar Museum has been ranked ninth among the world's 100 best museums in 2026, and first in Asia, according to the travel guide Worth a Journey. It is the only Indian museum on the list, and it sits one place ahead of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art at tenth. For a museum that only opened in 2015, that's quite a leap.
The Bihar Museum was created to give the state's long history a home worthy of it. Its galleries trace Pataliputra and Bihar from ancient times to the 18th century. The collection includes the Mauryan-era Didarganj Yakshi, one of the best-known pieces of ancient Indian sculpture, found near Patna in 1917.
The building is a modern one, designed by Tokyo's Maki and Associates with Mumbai-based Opolis Architects. The exhibitions were planned by Canadian consultancy Lord Cultural Resources, working with a women-led Indian team.
Beyond the history galleries, the museum has a few features worth planning your visit around:
A children's museum with interactive exhibits, which made it one of the first parts to open
A "visible storage" gallery showing terracotta and coin collections
A gallery on the Bihari diaspora
A museum shop with Madhubani, Manjusha and Sujani crafts
An in-house restaurant, so you can spend a full day there
It also hosts the Bihar Museum Biennale, which held its third edition in 2025 under the theme "Global South: Shared Heritage."
Plans are under way for a roughly 1.5 km underground walkway linking the Bihar Museum to the older Patna Museum, which would let visitors move between the two collections.
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