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Enrico Cernuschi was a man of passion. Born in Milan in 1821, he was such a fiery supporter of Italian independence from Austrian rule that he was forced to flee to Paris in 1850. There he Frenchified his first name to Henri and channeled his energy toward more lucrative pursuits, helping to found the Banque de Paris. In 1871, appalled by the turmoil of the Paris Commune, a workers' revolution, he took himself and the young art critic Theodore Duret on a world tour, during which he focused on collecting Asian art. Voraciously acquisitive, he was as likely to buy whole collections—even an entire museum—as a single work of art. One of the 5,000 pieces he brought back, a bronze Japanese buddha, was so enormous that he built an elegant Paris residence around it. For years, Cernuschi allowed visitors to see his vast collection by special request. Before his death in 1896, he bequeathed the building and its contents to his adopted city, which made it a public museum.

That Japanese buddha now reigns over a newly renovated Musèe Cernuschi. After nearly a century of refining and adding to Cernuschi's acquisitions, plus a three-year, $9 million refurbishment, the museum has reopened as one of Europe's premier collections of Chinese art—a coherent, chronological trove of works from the Neolithic period to the 13th century.

Cernuschi loved ancient bronzes—decorative, ceremonial and technologically sophisticated artifacts from China's earliest history. Among his acquisitions in the museum's extensive bronze collection is an enormous basin from the 6th century B.C., the largest of its kind outside China. But the true bronze masterpiece is a work older by some 600 years, the so-called Tigress you (wine vessel), which the museum bought after its patron's death. The vase, from the Shang dynasty (roughly 1550 to 1050 B.C.), was used for ancestor worship, and is shaped like an open-jawed feline, with a child either resting in its chest or being devoured. The placid expression on the child's face and the steady posture of the animal suggest that the non-violent interpretation is the correct one. In fact, the piece may allude to an ancient Chinese legend about a tigress adopting a human baby. The early bronze workers certainly knew how to convey animal brutality when they wanted to, as illustrated in two small ornaments nearby that depict fierce tigers attacking defenseless deer.

The museum also features an exceptional collection of tomb figures, or mingqi, especially from the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.). The Han believed that humans have both a physical life (po) and a spiritual one (hun), and that at death the two go their separate ways. While the spirit journeys to paradise, the po remains in the tomb. There, it needs the same kinds of company and comforts that it enjoyed in life, which the mingqi were designed to provide. The Cernuschi displays a vast array of these once-buried companions—dancers, musicians, cooks, soldiers and guardians, as well as ducks, birds and horses. These animated figures, along with the museum's glazed models of forts and bas-relief fragments from tomb walls, provide an extraordinary glimpse of Chinese life some 2,000 years ago: how people dressed, what they ate, what weapons they carried, what forms of transportation they used, what kinds of houses they lived in. One extremely well-modeled terra-cotta cook, probably from a Sichuan tomb, is intently scaling fish at his workbench. His eyes are fixed, his sleeves are rolled up, and his hat looks very much like a French chef's toque.

The museum's mingqi extend through several short-lived kingdoms up to the Tang dynasty (618 A.D. to 907 A.D.). Some of these pieces are not much better than those found today in the backrooms of dealers on Hong Kong's Hollywood Road. Still, there are some truly remarkable treasures on show, like the "Barbarian with Horn," a large sancai (three-color) glazed terra-cotta sculpture of an elaborately dressed man with bulging eyes, a handlebar moustache and full beard. Obviously he is not Han Chinese, and that's what makes figures from the vibrant Tang dynasty so interesting. During this period, trade along the Silk Route was at its height, and foreigners, like this Central Asian carrying a cornucopia-shaped wine vessel, were welcomed and valued. Xi'an, the Tang capital, was a prosperous, cosmopolitan city, as a small sculpture of an African entertainer demonstrates. This openness extended to women, too: an enchanting group of eight confident-looking young female musicians on horseback attests to their near-equal status with men.The renovation gives the Cernuschi more exhibition space, a new seminar room, improved lighting, state-of-the art display cases and other requisites of a modern museum. Yet elegant details of the 19th century mansion remain: oak parquet floors, decorative ceiling moldings and the original majestic staircase that leads to an upper-floor gallery decorated with bronze Japanese animals. Cernuschi's smoking room, too, has been recreated as a memorial to him.

But months after the official June opening, some exhibits—Shang dynasty daggers and ax heads; a bronze mask, perhaps from the important Sanxingdui find; and Tang ceramics—were still without identification labels. And the collection itself is uneven, though the true masterpieces are carefully set apart from the more mundane offerings. Still, it is tempting to go through the museum wondering what Cernuschi and the curators who followed him could—or should—have bought. Calligraphy from the Han dynasty? Silver and gold ornaments from the Tang dynasty?

But neither Cernuschi the man nor Cernuschi the museum intended to present an exhaustive collection of Asian art. Instead, in a quiet residential quarter of Paris, the museum offers, as curator Gilles Bèguin eloquently puts it, an "aesthetic promenade," a kind of random walk through the earliest periods of Chinese art. And that is exactly what makes the Musèe Cernuschi unique among museums of Asia. Just what Enrico, or rather Henri, would have wanted.

• Ann Morrison
• An eclectic display of Chinese art in Paris began life as the obsession of one extraordinary man