In Paris, the Guimet Museum is at the heart of a controversy over the disappearance of the word "Tibet" from its collections.

By The New Obs with AFP

Published on July 2, 2025 at 1:41 p.m. , updated July 2, 2025 at 1:53 p.m.

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A Parisian institution accused of seeking to "erase the existence" of Tibet. The Guimet Museum is the target of a lawsuit this Wednesday, July 2, accusing it of removing the name of this Chinese region from its collections in favor of the expression "Himalayan world."

"Since February 2024, the name "Tibet" (...) has been replaced by the name "Himalayan World" or "Tibetan Art" , specifies the administrative appeal filed by four associations, which suspect the Guimet Museum of "wanting to sow confusion about the cultural particularity of Tibet with the - political - objective of erasing the existence of Tibet" .

A mecca of Asian art, the Guimet National Museum rejects these accusations outright and, in a statement to AFP, denies any attempt to "make a culture invisible, let alone deny Tibetan identity."

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The controversy touches on a highly sensitive issue for Tibetans in exile, who accuse Beijing of wanting to wipe out the culture of this ancient Buddhist theocracy, which became one of China's "autonomous regions" in 1965 after being rocked by revolts.

For several years now, in its official communications in non-Chinese languages, Beijing has abandoned the term "Tibet Autonomous Region" in favor of "Xizang Autonomous Region."

In France, the controversy arose in the summer of 2024 following a column by around thirty researchers accusing the Guimet Museum and the Quai Branly Museum, dedicated to primitive arts, of "bowing down" to China by removing the word Tibet and of complying with its "desiderata (...) in terms of rewriting history" . Defended by Lily Ravon and William Bourdon, four French associations for the defense of Tibetans took over, putting the Guimet Museum on notice to change its position before taking the matter to administrative court on Wednesday.

In detail, their appeal argues an "excess of power" characterized by a letter dated May 5, 2025 in which the museum rejects their request to remove the expressions "Himalayan World" and "Tibetan art" from its labels or its website.

According to them, these terms do not respond to "any scientific or historical logic" and "violate" the mission assigned, in its statutes, to this museum to "promote knowledge of (its) collections" and to contribute "to education, training and research" .

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"While four of the five members of the museum's board of directors are notoriously close to the Chinese government, it is difficult not to see a political undercurrent and a deliberate choice by the Guimet Museum to comply with the demands of Chinese lobbying complacently relayed in France," declared Ravon and Bourdon in a statement to AFP.

The applicants are now asking the administrative court to order the museum to reinstate the word "Tibet" in its collections to present the exhibition rooms, on the labels accompanying the art objects or in brochures.

In response, the museum assures that "Tibet is very present and highlighted through the display of the signs, on which the terms "Tibet" and "Tibetan" appear ." The term Tibet thus appears "23 times" in the new collections guide of April 2025, it points out to AFP.

The institution says it understands that these changes in terminology "may provoke reactions" but justifies them by the desire to "better reflect the historical and cultural reality" of its collections and of a region that "far exceeds current or past political borders." "This is in no way a response to external pressure," the museum also insists, while Beijing has already been accused in the past of putting pressure on cultural institutions.