Collecting Asia: Theodore Duret's 'Voyage en Asie' and Henri Cernuschi's museum

This article examines the voyage made by Theodore Duret and Henri Cernuschi to Asia in 1871, shortly after the fall of the Paris Commune. The author analyses Duret's published account and Cernuschi's collecting practices in China, Japan, India, and Indonesia as discourses that participated in the contemporary discussions on European colonisation. In the examination of Cernuschi's collecting practices in Asia and his subsequent display strategies in Paris, the author argues that classic theories of collecting in the existing scholarship do not adequately address the issues involved in collecting objects and monuments across national borders. Cross-cultural collecting must be situated, however, within the geopolitical realities of the East and West as unequal spaces of exchange in the late nineteenth century.