The €260 million Musée du Quai Branly – Paris’s first major new museum since the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977 – opens this week after ten years of planning and construction. The museum, which celebates Asian and African culture and art, has been a favorite project of French President Jacque Chirac, “but when the museum’s directors opened the site for previews this week before its June launch, historians were already questioning what they feared could be a patronising attempt to display African works in a ‘mock jungle’ setting that rehashed ‘all France’s old colonial cliches’.”