Patna Beats Paris: Bihar Museum Ranked Ninth Among the World's Best Museums

When people talk about the world's great museums, Paris, New York and Madrid usually come up first. This year, Patna has joined that conversation. Its Bihar Museum now sits at No. 9 on a fresh global top-100 for 2026, higher than any other museum in Asia, and it is the only Indian entry.

The ranking

The list comes from Worth a Journey, a travel guide and online magazine based in Munich. It says it builds its rankings with an algorithm that crunches visitor and venue data from thousands of places worldwide, then sends people to visit the shortlisted museums in person and adjusts the results where their impressions differ.

• Top five: first place went to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, with the Prado (Madrid), Denmark's Louisiana modern-art museum, the Hermitage (Saint Petersburg) and Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum close behind.
• Patna's place: No. 9 overall, and the leader of the ten Asian entries.
• Famous names behind it: New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art also made the top ten, just below Patna, while the Louvre in Paris was placed 31st.

Like any ranking, it is one publication's view rather than an official award. But it is a striking result for a museum that only opened its doors a decade ago.

What makes the museum special

The Bihar Museum stands on Bailey Road in Patna, on a campus of about 13.9 acres. It partly opened in August 2015, and its main galleries followed in 2017, when more than 100 treasures moved across from the older Patna Museum. Its low, courtyard-filled building is the work of Maki and Associates, the firm of Japan's Fumihiko Maki (a winner of architecture's top prize, the Pritzker), working with Opolis Architects from Mumbai.

Room by room, sculpture, coins, manuscripts and folk art tell the story of a land that was once home to Pataliputra, capital of the Mauryan empire. The permanent galleries run from the earliest times up to 1764; later material stays at the older Patna Museum. There is a children's gallery, a gallery on the Bihari diaspora around the world, a shop selling Madhubani and other regional crafts, and a restaurant serving Bihari food.

The piece most visitors come to see is the Didarganj Yakshi: a life-size woman carrying a fly-whisk, carved in sandstone and polished to a shine, which villagers found by the Ganges outside Patna in 1917. Scholars have dated it to the Mauryan period (around the 3rd century BCE) or a few centuries later, so it is roughly 2,000 years old or more.

What this means for you

• Visiting home? If you're travelling to Bihar, or connecting through Patna, the museum is well worth half a day. Check opening hours and ticket prices on the Bihar Museum's official website before you go; it advertises reduced prices for evening visits.
• Bring your Cypriot friends: Cyprus has its own rich archaeological heritage, so museum lovers here will appreciate a world-class collection of Indian art and history. The Didarganj Yakshi alone makes the trip worthwhile.
• Share the story: much of India's heritage lies outside the usual tourist trail. A ranking like this is a reminder that places such as Patna deserve a spot on every traveller's list.

Read also: Prada, Dior and the 'Scandinavian Scarf': When the World Forgets to Credit Indian Craft

Sources: Indian Express, Outlook Traveller, Time Out India, NewsGram, The Palki Sharma Show (IGR), Wikipedia (Bihar Museum), Wikipedia (Didarganj Yakshi), Bihar Museum