Bihar Museum enters world's top 10 museums, ranks first in Asia

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.

Bihar Museum ranks first in Asia in 2026: A visitor's guide to its collections, architecture and special galleries

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.

What to see when you go to Bihar Museum

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."

More things to come

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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