How many of these great museums have you visited?
I’ve been to three. My colleague, four.
The domed Reading Room at the British Museum is one of the most famous museum interiors in history, but where does it stand in this list?
I’d love to complete the list, though that would take some time, as I'd have to get to two continents I've never seen.
What treasures they hold. A global resource we can all celebrate.
The museum sector has bounced back strongly from the COVID-19 pandemic.
New museums are opening up all the time.
And it’s never a bad time to visit your local museum - they'd love your support.
Here, by 2023 - 2024 visitor numbers, are...
The Top 10 Museums in the World
10 Nanjing Museum, China
The building was begun in 1933 under a completely different Chinese regime.
What’s inside? A huge amount, including some of the largest collections of Ming and Qing Dynasty porcelain in the world.
Don’t miss: A jade burial suit made from tiles of the stone, sewn together with silver wire.
Hidden gem: Paintings by Zhou Shuxi, a 17th Century woman painter renowned for the "silk-thread" fineness of her lines.
Nanjing has been China’s capital several times, as recently as 1949, and has major cultural heft in the country.
It’s home to the country’s oldest museum and one of the largest, with 430,000 items in a permanent collection, some of which is on display in galleries in a 17-acre site.
It was built from the 1930s onwards. Almost as soon as work started, the Japanese invasion (that included atrocities in Nanjing) interrupted progress. Building didn’t restart until the 1950s. A major reconstruction and expansion programme in the 2000s and 2010s has only made it larger.
A red lacquerware box from the Qing period in the 18th century. The character means "Spring". A lovely example from Nanjing Museum.
The collections stretch forward from the Paleolithic era (3.3 million BC to 12,000 BC, and the porcelain inside is perhaps the most important of its contents.
Visitors 2023 - 2024: 5 million
9 Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy
The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello is one of the key works in the Uffizi.
What’s inside? The greatest works of the Italian Rennaissance.
Don’t miss: So much is must-see, but how about Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.
Hidden gem: The Cabinet of Miniatures is a wonderful collection of portrait styles capturing and flattering generations of Italian aristocrats.
The Uffizi is stuffed full of the best works of the Italian Rennaissance, and its building is a beautiful attraction in its own right.
The palatial building that holds the art was built to Giorgio Vasari’s design for Cosimo I de' Medici from 1560. Uffizi means office, and this was an administrative office block.
The Medici family were powerful in Florence and around it, and were already assembling an impressive collection of art when the building was completed.
The Grand Tour trend of the 18th century helped make the Uffizi a must-see for aristocratic tourists seeking inspiration in the classical past.
Canaletto's Veduta del Palazzo Ducale di Venezia from the Uffizi.
It still has that status, and visitors in the peak summer season sometimes have to wait as long as five hours to get inside.
Visitors 2023 - 2024: 5.1 million
8 China Science and Technology Museum, Beijing
One of China's most popular museums has a great home near the Birdsnest Stadium.
What’s inside? Lots of interactive displays with an emphasis on education; it's a great children's museum.
Don’t miss: A 27-metre long Chuanjiesaurus skeleton. Yes, 27 metres.
Hidden gem: Try a simulated submarine trip with none of the risks of going underwater.
China’s national science museum sits in a site on the Olympic village from the 2008 Beijing games.
The building uses a Lu Ban Lock as the model for its design.
“The permanent exhibitions, with the themes of innovation and harmony, aim to inspire people’s interest in science and enlighten scientific concepts,” says the museum’s website.
Visitors 2023 - 2024: 5.3 million
7 American Museum of Natural History, New York
It's such an archetypal museum, the American Museum of Natural History starred in A Night at the Museum film.
What’s inside? A comprehensive collection of the natural - and human - world and beyond in some enormous and very beautiful buildings.
Don’t miss: You can't have a natural history museum without a giant, and they've got a T-Rex skeleton.
Hidden gem: Less showy but just as beautiful is a wonderful collection of meteorites, including some nanodiamonds over 5 billion years old and from beyond our solar system.
With a lovely location opposite Central Park and some fancy Victorian-era buildings, the American Museum of Natural History should be on the itinerary for any visitor to New York.
It’s over 230,000 m2 in size and the collection includes around 32 million specimens.
It’s not a national collection - the government doesn’t own it - but a non-profit corporation that has been running since 1871.
It’s always been popular, and sometimes controversial (just last year, the museum said it would stop displaying human remains, and it still keeps a large collection of Native American bodies).
A diorama from the museum's African section.
The collections include some of the world’s best dinosaur fossils and now features space age exhibits looking at natural worlds beyond the Earth.
Visitors 2023 - 2024: 5.4 million
6 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
The Met's mascot is William the Hippo, a nearly 4,000-year-old Egyptian burial item.
What’s inside? Masterpieces of human creativity from around the world and throughout our history.
Don’t miss: The Card Players by Paul Cézanne is from a series of five paintings, one of which once sold for $250 million. A key moment in the birth of modern art.
Hidden gem: Head to the photograph collection to see Walker Evans' pictures of America in the 1930s and 40s.
The Met has one of the world’s fanciest parties in the shape of the Met Gala. Last year, a single ticket was trading for $75,000, with funds going to support the museum, which must be accompanied with superlatives: the biggest art museum in the Americas, the most popular museum in the USA.
The collection includes 2 million objects in 17 departments.
It sits in buildings that were begun in 1880, 10 years after it was founded by a group of New Yorkers who wanted to establish a national art institution.
The Harvesters by Pieter Brueghel the Elder is one of the most important European works of art, but you'll need to go to New York to see it.
Much of the best work in the Met is the result of bequests, gifts and loans from rich collectors. It has been accused of not being careful enough about where acquisitions come from and some have been returned after criminal investigations.
That doesn’t stop it being one of the world’s greatest art collections - if you want to look at Impressionist art, you need to add the Met to your list.
It also holds sculpture, decorative arts, books, films and more.
Visitors 2023 - 2024: 5.4 million
5 Natural History Museum, London, UK
Hope the Whale welcomes visitors to the Kensington home of the Natural History Museum.
What’s inside? A world-renowned living scientific institution and a reflection of the natural world.
Don’t miss: Hope, the unmissable Blue Whale skeleton was injured by whalers before coming ashore in Ireland.
Hidden gem: Porites corals collected by Darwin during the epochal Voyage of the Beagle.
The big, hanging skeletons are the emblematic items in the Natural History Museum, one of the treasures of London’s imperial museum complex south of Hyde Park in London.
The full collections include 80 million items.
Want to understand evolution? Come and see the Charles Darwin collections. And, the museum is still a major centre of biological research.
It was founded as a subsidiary of the British Museum but has been an independent institution since the 1960s.
A dodo at the Natural History Museum. Many of Darwin's specimens can be found here.
The collections had a rough start: the museum was notorious for eccentric and incompetent staff, who lost and destroyed specimens on a whim or in fits of temper.
In its current home since 1883, it’s been a model of public science education and it's a must for most family trips to London. And it’s still free.
2023 - 2024 visitors: 5.7 million
4 The British Museum, London
The Great Court at the British Museum is now probably as famous as the old Reading Room. Image by Viktor Forgacs. CC BY-SA 4.0
What’s inside? Everything. From the world’s largest collection of Egyptian antiquities to a 600-strong collection of antique African throwing knives.
Don’t miss: The Rosetta Stone - the key that unlocked hieroglyphs.
Hidden gem: Make sure you check out the temporary exhibitions. In summer 2025 you can see "Admonitions of the instructress to the court ladies," an ancient Chinese scroll telling an empress how to behave.
The British Museum’s broad remit - “human history, art and culture” - has given it the world’s largest permanent museum collection. But the roots of its 8 million-strong collection lie with just one man, Sir Hans Sloane, whose personal obsessions helped create the world’s first national museum in 1759.
The museum dominates its corner of London and is the most-visited site in the UK.
It’s never uncontroversial. Many of the objects were “collected” as Britain assembled the largest empire in world history and their original owners would like them back - most famously in the case of the Elgin Marbles from the Acropolis in Athens.
Nevertheless, Sloane’s “curiosities” have helped create a world-historic collection that really does take in most of human life.
Parts of the so-called Elgin Marbles are among the most popular exhibits at the British Museum, but the Greek government would also love to own them. Image Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany • CC BY-SA 2.0
The museum did include what is now the British Library, but that was broken off in the 1970s. However, the Reading Room remains in the museum, where, among others Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin (with a false name), Sun Yat-sen, Mahatma Gandhi, George Orwell, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Virginia Woolf did their research and writing.
The new famous domed central court is a regular backdrop for film crews who need to establish a London location.
Visitors 2023 - 2024: 5.8 million
3 National Museum of China, Beijing
Opposite the Great Hall of the People, the National Museum of China is at the heart of the country's capital.
What’s inside? A survey of China's history from the most ancient times to the space age, with a heavy emphasis on the Revolution.
Don’t miss: An indigo-glazed porcelain zun (vessel) with swallows and gold-painted design from the Qing Dynasty. A rare and precious remnant of the old Summer Palace destroyed by Anglo-French forces in 1860.
Hidden gem: Chairman Mao's Red Army hat. Originally a gift from American journalist Edgar Snow to Mao.
The word’s most populous country demands a big museum and you’d expect it to attract a lot of people.
A site on the capital’s massive Tiananmen Square is the world’s largest single-building museum and it has the world’s best collection of Chinese culture.
The museum was founded in 2003 by bringing together a number of other institutions, including the Museum of the Chinese Revolution. Its home was built to celebrate the revolution’s 10th anniversary in 1949 and complements the rest of the reconstruction of Tiananmen, China’s national public space.
The huge collections take in Chinese history from 1.7 million years ago to today.
A Chinese space craft helps bring the collection up to date.
There are more than 1 million items in the main collection taking visitors to the fall of the Qing dynasty. A separate exhibition tackles modern China, the Revolution, and the People’s Republic, founded in 1949.
Visitors 2023 - 2024: 6.7 million
2 Vatican Museums, Rome
When you have the Sistine Chapel on your property you have a good start to any museum collection.
What’s inside? The treasures of the Catholic Church, including some of the most important European art.
Don’t miss: The Sistine Chapel, perhaps the greatest achievement of Italian Renaissance art, is literally part of the furniture here.
Hidden gem: Salvador Dali's L’Annuncio. You may be surprised to find the master of surrealism in this ancient institution.
In very large part, the story of the modern West is the story of the Catholic Church.
And, so, in its home - an independent state within Italy - is one of the greatest collections of art in history.
The whole of the Vatican is a museum of a sort, and the best known work here is probably part of the furniture - Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.
Although the Papacy dates back to the Roman Empire, the museums are rooted in the 16th-century purchase of a Roman statue by Pope Julius II. But the collections now include some of the best-known classical sculpture.
The church has been a rich, powerful presence at the centre of European political and cultural life since before the fall of the Roman Empire. Until the Reformation, much of the art produced in Europe intended to celebrate the church or was created for it.
This 14th-Century Giotto triptych was made for St Peter's. Much of the Vatican Museum collection is of sacred art.
Much of that work is collected here, attracting huge numbers of visitors, who can get in for free one Sunday a month.
That wasn’t enough for one American visitor in 2022, who smashed a sculpture when he was told his visit didn’t include a personal audience with the Pope.
Visitors 2023 -2024: 6.8 million
1 The Louvre, Paris, France
The Venus de Milo is one of many works in the Louvre that can claim to be household names well outside the specialist art world.
What’s inside? The Mona Lisa and a parade of masterpieces from ancient times onwards.
Don’t miss: The Mona Lisa. It's silly to deny its power. Go early or in off-season if you want to get close to it.
Hidden gem: Take a look up and around you, the building itself is an important piece of French and European history, and very beautiful.
There’s one work that symbolises the magnificent collections of the former palace of the French kings.
The Mona Lisa usually has a crowd around it, and is protected by the latest high-tech security to avoid a repeat of its theft in 1911 or its use in protest stunts.
It is one of around 500,000 objects on display in an enormous collection whose roots are in confiscated royal treasures.
The museum opened during the French Revolution, but has kept going as a national and international institution through restorations and republics, and occupation.
The building isn't bad either. The Louvre used to house the French royal family. Now it is home to many of the treasures they collected.
There are eight departments to the museum, which take in ancient history as well as art, and it has the same ownership issues as many European museums. A lot of the exhibits might be described as imperial loot, Napoleon brought a lot of things back from his military adventures, and 20,000 items were added during the Second Empire.
Its enormous site and location right in the centre of Paris mean you can’t avoid it if you visit the city, and millions of people don’t.
Visitors 2023 - 2024: 8.7 million
Museums and collecting
As the world's largest dealer in rare collectibles, Paul Fraser Collectibles partners with major museums around the world to find the best homes for some of the world's rarest and most precious items.
