London, United Kingdom
British Museum
The first national museum open to the public, founded in 1753 and free ever since. It holds eight million things from every part of the world. How many of them should still be here is argued over every year.
Photo: Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are standing in the largest covered square in Europe, in the middle of a museum that has never charged for admission. It opened in 1759 with the collection of one London doctor. It now holds about eight million objects, and shows about one in a hundred.
It was built up while Britain ruled a quarter of the world. That is why the best things from Egypt, Iraq, Greece, Nigeria and China can be seen under one roof, and why so many countries want some of them back.
The whole permanent collection is free. Special exhibitions are ticketed, and so, in 2026 and 2027, is the Bayeux Tapestry.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Great Court and the Reading Room | Free; the Reading Room is seen from a viewing point |
| Egyptian sculpture and the Rosetta Stone (Room 4) | Free |
| Assyria (Rooms 6 to 10) | Free |
| The Parthenon sculptures (Room 18) | Free |
| Africa (Room 25) and Easter Island (Room 24) | Free |
| Sutton Hoo and Europe (Rooms 40 and 41) | Free; some objects may be on loan in 2026–27 |
| China (Rooms 33 and 95) | Free; the Admonitions Scroll is shown a few weeks a year |
| Special exhibitions | Ticketed |
The round building in the middle is the old Reading Room. Karl Marx wrote Capital at its desks, and Sun Yat-sen read there too. The glass roof over the court was added in 2000.
Turn left from the main door into the long gallery of Egyptian sculpture. A few steps in stands the Rosetta Stone, the slab that let scholars read Egyptian writing again after fourteen hundred years.
Beyond it are the carved walls of Assyrian palaces and, in a hall of their own, the sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens. Greece has asked for those for two hundred years.
Go upstairs and to the back for China. One of the oldest Chinese paintings on silk is here. It is shown for only a few weeks each year.
"Everything in it was stolen." Much was bought, dug up with permission, or given. Some was taken in war or by force: the Benin bronzes, for one. Each object has its own story, and the museum now tells more of them on its labels.
"The British Library is inside." The books left in 1997 for a new building at St Pancras, a mile to the north. The round Reading Room is now empty of readers.
"It is a museum about Britain." Only a few rooms are. Its subject is the whole of human history.
"Free means you can just walk in." You can, but on busy days people with a free timed ticket booked online go in first.
The first six stops are on the ground floor. The last three are upstairs.
Sir Hans Sloane was a London physician who collected everything: plants, coins, shells, books, antiquities, 71,000 items in all. He died in 1753 and left them to the nation for a sum well below their value. Parliament raised the money by a public lottery and bought a mansion on this site to put them in.
Part of Sloane's money came from sugar plantations in Jamaica worked by enslaved Africans. In 2020 the museum moved his bust into a case with a label that says so.
The museum opened on 15 January 1759, free to "all studious and curious persons". At first you had to apply in writing for a ticket and wait weeks. The temple front with its forty-four columns was built between 1823 and 1852.
The Reading Room was built in the museum's courtyard in 1857. Its dome is 43 metres across, almost the size of the Pantheon in Rome. Anyone with a ticket could sit at its desks and ask for any book in the national library.
Dickens, Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gandhi and Virginia Woolf held tickets. So did Lenin, under the name Jacob Richter.
The roof over the court, by the architect Norman Foster, opened in 2000. It has 3,312 panes of glass, and no two are the same shape.
The stone carries one decree of 196 BC, written three times: in the picture-signs of the Egyptian priests, in the everyday Egyptian script, and in Greek. Scholars could read the Greek. In 1822 the Frenchman Champollion used it to work out the other two.
French soldiers found it in 1799 while rebuilding a fort in the Nile delta. Two years later the British defeated them and took it under the terms of surrender. Look at the left edge. Painted there in English is "Captured in Egypt by the British Army 1801".
It is the most visited object in the museum. Egypt has asked more than once for its return.
The human-headed winged bulls guarded the gates of Assyrian palaces in what is now northern Iraq, about 2,700 years ago. Each has five legs. From the front it stands still, and from the side it walks.
In the narrow rooms behind them, stone panels show King Ashurbanipal hunting lions, carved about 645 BC. The king is stiff and calm. The dying lions are among the most closely observed animals in ancient art.
Both were dug up in the 1840s and 1850s and shipped to London with the leave of the Ottoman sultan. Some of what stayed behind was smashed by the Islamic State group in 2015.
This hall holds about half of the surviving sculpture of the Parthenon: 75 metres of the frieze, fifteen of the square panels, and seventeen figures from the gables. Lord Elgin's men took them down between 1801 and 1805, when Athens was under Ottoman rule.
Elgin had hoped to decorate his house in Scotland. He ran out of money and sold them to Parliament in 1816 for £35,000, less than half his costs.
The other half is in Athens, in a museum built to receive these. The two sides have been talking since 2022. This site has a page for the Acropolis Museum, where the argument is set out from the Greek side.
Downstairs, in the Africa galleries, a wall is covered with brass plaques from the royal palace of Benin, in what is now Nigeria. In 1897 a British force burned the city and carried off several thousand works. About nine hundred are here.
Museums in Germany and elsewhere have handed their Benin pieces back since 2022. The British Museum says the law forbids it to give away its collection.
In a gallery off the Great Court stands a basalt figure from Rapa Nui, Easter Island, taken by a British warship in 1868. Its name means "lost or stolen friend". Islanders came to London in 2018 to ask for it.
In 1939, on the eve of war, a landowner in Suffolk had the mounds on her estate dug. In the largest was the print of a ship 27 metres long, and in it the grave goods of an English king of about 625: gold, garnets and an iron helmet with a face. The helmet was in five hundred pieces.
The film The Dig (2021) tells the story, with Ralph Fiennes as the self-taught digger who found the ship.
The chessmen were carved from walrus tusk about 1150, probably in Norway, and found in a sand dune on a Scottish island in 1831. Look at the queens, chin in hand, and the foot soldiers biting their shields. The wizard chess in the first Harry Potter film was modelled on them.
From September 2026 to July 2027 the museum is showing the Bayeux Tapestry, lent by France. In exchange, Britain agreed to lend the Sutton Hoo treasure and the chessmen to France. Check on the day whether they are here.
The Admonitions Scroll illustrates a text of advice to the ladies of the imperial court. The painting is linked to Gu Kaizhi, who lived about AD 345 to 406. Most scholars think this is a copy made between the fifth and the eighth century. Either way it is among the oldest Chinese scroll paintings left.
It was in the Qing imperial collection. In 1900, when foreign armies occupied Beijing after the Boxer rising, a British officer came by it, and in 1903 he sold it to the museum for £25. The museum later cut it into sections and pasted it flat, which harmed it. It is now too fragile for long display. In 2026 it was shown from 13 July to 24 August.
The two tall blue-and-white vases carry an inscription dating them to 1351, under the Yuan (1271–1368). They are the fixed point from which all early blue-and-white porcelain is dated. They belong to a collection of 1,700 Chinese ceramics formed by Sir Percival David and given to the museum in 2024.
The museum opened in 1759, the twenty-fourth year of the Qianlong Emperor, when the Qing (1644–1912) was at its largest. Qianlong was a collector too, and the Admonitions Scroll carries his seals and a small orchid he painted on it.
The Reading Room opened in 1857, in the middle of the second Opium War. Three years later British and French troops burned the Old Summer Palace outside Beijing. Things looted there are in museums across Europe, and a few are here.
In 2023 the museum admitted that about two thousand small objects had been stolen from its own stores over many years. Its director resigned. For Chinese commentators, and many others, the theft weakened the old argument that things are safest in London.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1753 | Parliament founds the museum | Eighteenth year of the Qianlong Emperor |
| 1759 | The museum opens, free | Qianlong completes the conquest of Xinjiang |
| 1801–1816 | The Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon sculptures arrive | The Jiaqing reign; a British embassy is turned away from Beijing in 1816 |
| 1857 | The Reading Room opens | The second Opium War |
| 1896–1897 | Sun Yat-sen reads here | The year after the Qing loses the war with Japan |
| 1903 | The Admonitions Scroll is bought for £25 | Three years after foreign armies entered Beijing |
| 1939 | The Sutton Hoo ship is found | China is in the third year of the war with Japan |
| 2000 | The Great Court opens | China is about to join the World Trade Organization |
| 2026 | The Bayeux Tapestry comes on loan from France | The Admonitions Scroll is shown for six weeks in summer |
One line to remember: free since 1759, eight million objects, and an argument over who should keep them.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
A painted coffin lid in the Egyptian rooms, called the Unlucky Mummy, is said to bring death or ruin to those who own or mock it. One story has it sinking the Titanic.
Source: London newspapers from the 1900s; the museum notes that the board has never left the building
Marx always sat at the same desk, and visitors from the Soviet Union and China used to ask to be shown it. The staff would point to a seat.
Source: Told by the Reading Room staff; no record of his seat exists, and readers took whatever desk was free
A closed Underground station called British Museum lies under the street nearby. The ghost of an Egyptian princess is said to walk its tunnel at night and scream.
Source: A London ghost story, used in the film Bulldog Jack (1935)
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The museum's own pages as returned by a web search in November 2026; the pages themselves could not be opened from our tools.
Checked 2026-11-12
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