Seattle Asian Art Museum

About this audio guide

This guide to the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Seattle starts in a nineteen thirty-three San Francisco warehouse yard, where dealers called a set of carved stone camels and rams white elephants nobody wanted. Richard Fuller and his mother Margaret saw otherwise, buying the marble herd carved centuries earlier in China and said to have guarded an emperor's tomb. You'll hear how the two poured a chunk of their family fortune into architect Carl Gould's Art Moderne museum atop Capitol Hill's Volunteer Park. Look for the camels flanking the entrance, part of a climbing tradition that goes back nine decades.