Astor Court

Astor Court, also called the Ming Hall, is a Chinese garden courtyard inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, created as a Ming-dynasty-style space and completed as the first permanent cultural exchange between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Inspired by Brooke Astor and modeled on a courtyard in Suzhou’s Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets, it was built largely in China and assembled in New York by twenty-seven Suzhou specialists using traditional methods. Its carefully arranged gates, walkways, windows, rocks, water, and symbolic details made it both an artistic setting for Ming furniture and a visible sign of warming relations between the two countries.

New York, New York · United States