Musée Guimet and Musée de la Mode
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Musée Guimet

As you head east and downhill from Trocadéro, a couple of excellent, rather specialized museums stand within a stone's throw of each other. The first, on place d'Iéna, is the wonderful Musée National des Arts Asiatiques – Guimet (daily except Tues 10am–6pm; €5.50; M° Iéna; www.museeguimet.fr), whose breathtaking roofed-in courtyard provides an airy, modern space in which to show off the museum's world-renowned collection of Khmer sculpture – from the civilization that produced Cambodia's Angkor Wat. The museum winds round four floors groaning under the weight of statues of Buddhas and gods, some fierce, some meditative, all of them dramatically lit and imaginatively displayed on plinths or in sometimes surprising niches and cabinets. Each room is devoted to a different country of origin, stretching from Afghanistan to China. The Buddhist statues of the Gandhara civilization, on the first floor, betray a fascinating debt to Greek sculpture, while the fierce demons from Nepal, the many-armed gold gods of South India or the pot-bellied Chinese Buddhas are stunningly exotic. Ceramics, paintings and other objets d'art are scattered among the statuary, and on the third floor is a rotunda used by the collection's founder, Émile Guimet, for the first Buddhist ceremony ever held in France. A great collector and patron of the arts, Guimet came from a family of enormously wealthy industrialists and espoused the Christian-socialist-egalitarian theories about society, class and government proposed by Fournier, Saint-Simon and, in Britain, Robert Owen. His original collection, which he brought back from his travels in Asia in 1876, is exhibited nearby in the small and attractive Galeries du Panthéon Bouddhique, at 19 avenue d'Iéna. Above the rotunda, two beautiful Chinese lacquer screens crown the topmost floor, while at the back of the museum is a small Japanese garden, complete with bamboo, pussy willow and water.

A little further to the east, opposite the Palais de Tokyo, set in small gardens at 10 avenue Pierre 1^er de Serbie, stands the grandiose Palais Galliera, home to the Musée de la Mode et du Costume (daily except Monday 10am–6pm; €7; M° Iéna/Alma-Marceau). The museum's collection of clothes and fashion accessories from the eighteenth century to the present day is exhibited in temporary, themed shows of which there are two or three a year – during changeovers the museum is closed.