The Museums für Völkerkunde Dresden is an ethnographic museum in Dresden. It is located inside the Japanisches Palais, a Baroque-style palace from the early 18th century. The museum is part of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the state collection of the Land of Saxony. It houses ethnographic and anthropological collections with material from all parts of the world, including numerous precious and irreplaceable testimonies of cultures that no longer exist. The main nucleus of the collection has ancient origins: many of the objects come from the ancient Kunstkammer of Elector Augustus I of Saxony, founded in the 16th century. The objects collected by the Prince and his successors reflected a desire to exhibit their passion for all things exotic and curious. From the 18th century onwards, collecting has become more systematic, following purely scientific criteria. 1875 is considered the founding year of the museum, which today boasts an internationally important collection of non-European works of art. Today, the collection consists of approximately 90,000 objects and 70,000 pictorial documents and includes material from Oceania, Africa, America, Asia, Australia and Europe. An important part of the collection is the so-called "Damascus Hall", which includes Ottoman wood panels from 1810, from a house in the Syrian city of Damascus. In 1899 the photographer Hermann Burchardt bought the wooden parts and sent them to Germany on behalf of Karl Ernst Osthaus, the founder of the Folkwang Museum. Osthaus never exhibited them and his heirs donated them, in 1930, to the Museum of Ethnology. There they remained in the warehouse until 1997, when they were restored and integrated into the museum's collection. In addition to the permanent exhibitions, the museum holds temporary exhibitions.