National Museum of Indonesia

National Museum

Museum Nasional
The front view of the museum
Location within Jakarta
Interactive fullscreen map
Established	1778
Location	Jl. Medan Merdeka Barat No.12, Central Jakarta, Jakarta, Indonesia
Coordinates	6°10′34″S 106°49′18″E / 6.17611°S 106.82167°E / -6.17611; 106.82167
Type	Archaeology museums
Owner	Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology
Public transit access	Monas
Website	museumnasional.or.id

The National Museum of Indonesia (Indonesian: Museum Nasional) is an archeological, historical, ethnological, and geographical museum located in Jalan Medan Merdeka Barat, Central Jakarta, right on the west side of Merdeka Square. Popularly known as the Elephant Museum (Indonesian: Museum Gajah) after the elephant statue in its forecourt, its broad collections cover all of Indonesia's territory and almost all of its history. The museum has endeavoured to preserve Indonesia's heritage for two centuries.^[1]

The museum is regarded as one of the most complete and the best in Indonesia, as well as one of the finest museums in Southeast Asia.^[2] The museum has preserved about 141,000 objects, ranging from prehistoric artifacts to archeology, numismatics, ceramics, ethnography, history and geography collections.^[3] It has comprehensive collections of stone statues of the classical Hindu-Buddhist period of ancient Java and Sumatra as well as quite extensive collections of Asian ceramics.

A fire affected some rooms of the old building on 16th September 2023.^[4] Since then the museum is closed to the public as some renewals are ongoing. Even there is not an official date for reopening, the museum management has mentioned that it should be in late 2024.