Museum for East-Asian Arts

About this audio guide

This guide to the Museum for East-Asian Arts asks why a collection of Chinese, Japanese and Korean art took thirty-three years to find a permanent home in Cologne. It goes back to April 1944, when Allied bombs destroyed the museum's first building on Hansaring, and to the crates of art the staff had already shipped off to salt mines for safekeeping, while smaller pieces left behind in a bunker vanished in the war's chaos. You'll hear about the collection's founders, Adolf and Frieda Fischer, who spent a lifetime assembling it, and the decades the city spent deciding what to do with it. Notice how much of the collection actually made it through the war intact, thanks to those wartime shipments south.