National Museum of Ethnology, the Netherlands

Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden traces to King William I's 1816 Royal Cabinet of Curiosities in The Hague, founded on donated "Chinese curiosities" and expanded with Japanese collections from J. Cock Blomhoff (1826), Ph. F. von Siebold (1831) and J.F. van Overmeer Fisscher (1832). When the Cabinet dissolved in 1883, its ethnographic holdings passed to the National Ethnographic Museum in Leiden (opened 1864), which grew further with Indonesian, South Seas, African (including Benin bronzes), American (Peruvian ceramics), Tibetan and Siberian material through the early 20th century.

The museum moved to its current building in 1937 and was renamed the National Museum of Ethnology, adding New Guinea and Greenland material after WWII and undergoing major renovation in the 1990s.

On 1 April 2014 it merged with the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam, est. 1864) and the Africa Museum (Berg en Dal, est. 1954) to form the National Museum of World Cultures across three sites — each retaining its own name — with a combined collection of over 400,000 items and a shared Research Centre for Material Culture.

Collection size: 200,000 objects, plus 500,000 images/multimedia items and 40,000 books. Highlights include Qing-period Chinese objects, Edo and Bunka-Bunsei period Japanese paintings, Tibetan ritual objects, Santal culture pieces, Indian gold jewellery, Korean ritual objects, Indonesian wayang/batik/kris, an Indo-Javanese collection, Oceanic tapa and Fiji material, American Indian silver jewellery, Pueblo pottery, Navajo textiles, Hopi Kachina dolls, Mesoamerican textiles, Greenlandic modern art, Sami and Siberian collections, West/Central African material (Benin bronzes), and a photography collection.