Andrzej Michał Wawrzyniak (3 December 1931 – 8 November 2020) was a Polish sailor, diplomat, connoisseur and collector of Oriental art, and Founder, Lifetime Director, and Chief Curator of the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw. In Indonesia, a country with which he had very close professional and emotional ties, he was known as “Andrzej Nusantara Wawrzyniak”. Life Andrzej Wawrzyniak was born on 3 December 1931 in Warsaw. At the age of sixteen he boarded the full-rigged school ship “Dar Pomorza”, then sailed on twelve ships, moving up from being a deck boy to the rank of officer of the Polish Merchant Marine. In the meantime he graduated from the Diplomatic and Consular Faculty of the Foreign Service School in Warsaw, then studied at the Maritime Faculty of the Economic School in Sopot, and at the Social Sciences School in Warsaw (postgraduate and doctoral studies). In 1956 he joined the Polish diplomatic service, to be promoted in 1973 to the rank of the Minister Plenipotentiary. From 1956–1960 Andrzej Wawrzyniak was chief of the department of the Polish Delegation to the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam. From 1961–1965 – he was a cultural attaché to – and from 1967 to 1971 deputy head of mission and chargé d'affaires at the Embassy of Poland in Indonesia. From 1973–1974 – he was head of the Polish Delegation to the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Laos. From 1977–1981 – he was head of the Polish Embassy in Nepal. He was also the UN international observer of the elections in Namibia (1989). From 1990–1993 - he was a head of the Polish Embassy in Afghanistan, later a head of the Field Office of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina (1996) and UN observer in East Timor (1999). Andrzej Wawrzyniak had also been the Honorary Consul General of Sri Lanka in Poland (1997–2003). Altogether he spent more than a quarter of a century in Asia amassing a significant collection of ethnographical and artistic objects from various countries. Indonesian art collection The largest impact on his life was his diplomatic assignment to Indonesia lasting nearly 9 years during the 1960s. After his return to Poland, he donated his collection, numbering over 3,000 objects, to the Polish State. Prof. Stanisław Lorentz described Andrzej Wawrzyniak's Indonesian collection as “one of the largest private Indonesian collections, exceeding even the Dutch collections which are considered