A gyűjtemény leírása
Four-fifths of the 16 thousand items currently found in the Asia Collection date to the initial period of the museum's history, which lasted from the end of the 19th until the beginning of the 20th century. The foundations for the collection were laid by János Xántus's expedition to East and Southeast Asia between 1868 and 1870, during which some two thousand artefacts from China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and India were collected.
Between the year 1880 and the onset of the Second World War, conscious efforts at expanding the museum's holdings placed what were termed "related peoples" in the focal point of field work pursued in non-Hungarian locations. In Asian countries to which this concept did not apply, field work was limited to the collection of a few representative objects of limited size. For "related peoples," however, the concept targeted acquisition of a full complement of ethnographic material, in the hope of eventually coming to a deeper understanding of artefacts collected domestically. The term "related peoples" was understood to include four sub-categories: the Finno-Ugric, Turkic-Tartar, Caucasian, and Iranian ethnic groups. As a result of this work, by the end of the 19th century, the museum's special collection on Ural-Altaic-Caucasian peoples had grown to become the largest of its kind in Europe outside Russia.
Of particular interest within the collection are the Zichy collection on Turkestan; the Amur and Ajnu material collected by Benedek Baráthosi Balogh; Vilmos Diószegi's Mongolian and Siberian shaman collection; a group of objects brought from Turkey by Gyula Mészáros; and items related to Mongolian lamas contributed by Hans Leder. Quantitatively, the largest subgroups are those comprising items from China and Japan, India, the Amur region, Mongolia, Turkey, the Caucasus Mountains, and Turkestan.
The curator of the collection is Gábor Wilhelm Ph.D.