Museum Five Continents

Germany's oldest ethnological museum with 160,000 non-European objects

The Museum Five Continents on Maximilianstrasse in Munich is Germany's oldest ethnological museum, founded in 1862 as the Royal Ethnographic Collection. It holds around 160,000 objects from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Oceania and the Islamic Orient – art objects, everyday items and ritual pieces from non-European cultures. The name Five Continents was introduced in 2014, reflecting its self-understanding as a house of world culture. Ongoing debates about colonial provenance make the museum a lively forum for discussing the origin and repatriation of cultural objects.