Patna's Bihar Museum Is Ninth on Worth a Journey's World's 100 Best Museums 2026 List, the Highest Place for an Asian Museum and the Only Indian Entry, With the Met at 10th and the Louvre at 31st

The Bihar Museum in Patna is ninth on Worth a Journey’s World’s 100 Best Museums 2026, the highest place for any Asian museum on the list and the only Indian museum among the 100. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is tenth and the Louvre in Paris is 31st, according to the guide’s own list. Indian outlets reported the result between 29 and 31 October 2026.

The top ten

Worth a Journey, a guide edited in Munich, publishes its lists in rank order. The first ten museums on the 2026 museum list are the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum in Turkey, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, the Bihar Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ten of the 100 museums are in Asia, in five countries. The guide’s Asia page names Bihar Museum as the highest placed, with the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Katsuyama, Japan, at 24 and the Borneo Cultures Museum in Kuching, Malaysia, at 35. The Bihar Museum is the only entry marked as being in India.

How the list is made

Worth a Journey says every list is computed by its own algorithm, which works through millions of data points from hundreds of thousands of venues and applies the same rules to each. It says it also visits ranked venues in person and recalibrates the algorithm where a visit and the computed result disagree. It states that no venue can pay to enter a list or rise on it. Outlook Luxe describes the museum list as drawing on visitor reviews, data analysis and on-site assessments. The guide does not say on its pages which museums it visited this year.

The museum category admits any institution with a permanent collection or exhibition that is open to the public. It leaves out memorials and memorial museums, palaces, castles and churches where the building is the visit, children’s museums, zoos and aquariums.

A museum built to hold what the old one could not

The Bihar Museum’s own history page says it began with a space problem. The Patna Museum, established in 1917, had forty thousand displayable objects and could show only a fraction of them. Two annexes were first proposed, and the state’s then Chief Minister, Nitish Kumar, instead put forward a separate, modern museum.

The Ministry of Tourism’s Incredible India page says the new museum was opened gradually, from August 2015, with the remaining galleries unveiled in October 2017. It gives the site as 5.6 hectares with 24,000 square metres of built-up area; the museum’s own page says the campus covers more than 13 acres. The museum’s page gives its range as the earliest civilisations up to 1764, with traditional, folk and contemporary art as well.

The building

The architecture is credited to Maki and Associates of Tokyo, led by Fumihiko Maki, who received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1993, with Opolis Architects of Mumbai. Maki died in 2024. Incredible India calls the design a joint effort of Indian and Japanese firms and describes terraces and courtyards that join indoor and outdoor space, among them the Waterfall, Peepal, Amphitheatre and Niranjana courtyards.

What is inside

The museum’s collection page lists an Orientation Gallery with a short film, three chronological history galleries, a History Art Gallery, a Regional Art Gallery, a Diaspora Gallery, Visible Storage, a Children’s Gallery and a Contemporary Art Gallery. Gallery A covers the rise of the Mauryas under Ashoka and themes of Buddhism and Jainism. Gallery B covers the Sungas, Kushans, Guptas and Palas, and Gallery C the Bengal Nawabs, the Patna School of Painting and the Sultanates. Visible Storage runs from the earliest punch-marked coins to medieval coins and terracotta. The Diaspora Gallery describes the growing influence of Bihar’s people around the world.

The best-known object is the Didarganj Yakshi, which the museum places in its History Art Gallery. According to the MAP Academy’s Encyclopedia of Art, as excerpted by ThePrint, local people found the polished Chunar sandstone figure by accident on the bank of the Ganga in October 1917. It went to the Patna Museum, was shown in London in 1947 and in France and the United States in the 1980s, came back to Patna in 1989 and moved to the Bihar Museum in 2017. The same text says the date is disputed: earlier scholars placed it in the third century BCE, in the Mauryan period, and more recent scholarship places it in the first or second century CE, under the Kushans.

Outlook Luxe, Esquire India and the Free Press Journal also name a Kushan-period slab of the Birth of the Buddha and Pala-dynasty bronzes from Kurkihar. For the dynasties behind the bronzes, see the Pala dynasty of Bengal and Bihar. The Mauryan pillared hall at Kumhrar, also in Patna, is covered in the Kumhrar article, and the Mauryan rock-cut caves of the same state in the Barabar and Nagarjuni caves.

The museum also runs the Bihar Museum Biennale. Its site records a virtual first edition in 2021, an on-site second edition in 2023 with participation from more than 15 countries, and a third edition from 7 August to 31 December 2025 on the theme of the Global South.

Reactions

Anand Mahindra, chairman of the Mahindra Group, wrote on X, as ThePrint reported on 29 October 2026: “May this be the beginning of a museum renaissance in India.” He credited the former Chief Minister and the state government’s administrators for the museum.

What the ranking is

The list is one travel guide’s computed ranking. It is not an official, UNESCO or museum-association ranking, and Indian outlets describe the publisher variously as a travel guide, a travel magazine and an independent guide. The placings of the Met and the Louvre are positions on this list only, under the eligibility rules above.

Visiting

As of 5 November 2026 the museum’s site gives these timings: closed on Mondays, galleries 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, and the Children’s Gallery, museum shop and library 10:00 am to 7:00 pm. Worth a Journey and Esquire India both put the ticket for Indian adult visitors at ₹100, with Worth a Journey adding that students pay half with ID; fees can change, so check the museum before travelling. The guide suggests four to five hours. The museum lists the exhibition Cosmic Garden, with works by Madhvi Parekh and Manu Parekh and embroidery by Karishma Swali and the Chanakya School of Craft, from 22 October to 15 November 2026.