The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is a museum in San Francisco. It has one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world. The collection has approximately 18,000 works of art and artifacts from all major Asian countries and traditions, some of which are as much as 6,000 years old. Major galleries are devoted to the arts of South Asia, West Asia (including Persia), Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, China, Korea and Japan. There are 2,500 works on display in the permanent collection.
The museum has become a focus for special and traveling exhibitions, including: the first major Chinese exhibition to travel outside China since the end of World War II (in 1975), an archaeological exhibition which attracted 800,000 visitors over an eight-week period, and an exhibition on wisdom and compassion opened by the Dalai Lama in 1991.