What is the Chau Chak Wing Museum?
The Chau Chak Wing Museum is a public museum at the University of Sydney, opened in 2020. It brings together the university's natural history, antiquities, art and cultural collections.
The museum combines three historic collections: the Nicholson Collection of antiquities, the Macleay Collection of natural history and ethnography, and the University Art Collection. Together they hold hundreds of thousands of objects.
Highlights include ancient Egyptian mummies and coffins, Greek pottery, Roman sculpture, insects and specimens collected in the nineteenth century, and Aboriginal and Pacific objects.
A new home
The museum is named after Chau Chak Wing, a businessman whose donation helped fund the building. Its modern design, by Johnson Pilton Walker, sits beside the university's sandstone Quadrangle.
The building includes object-based learning studios, where university classes study real items from the collections up close, a reminder that the museum is also a teaching space.
Entry is free, and exhibitions change regularly, often linking objects to current research.
Did You Know?
The Nicholson Collection was founded by Sir Charles Nicholson in 1860 and is the largest collection of antiquities in the Southern Hemisphere.