They were destinations of conquest and desire for millennia. Reaching them by caravan or by sea was dangerous, if not deadly. Yet traders and invaders from across Europe and Asia couldn’t resist the allure of China, India and Southeast Asia.

Thanks to the completion of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s new West Wing, Northeast Ohioans can now travel with ease – artistically speaking – to places that once fired the imaginations of Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Columbus and Magellan.

The Cleveland Museum of Art's atrium is the centerpiece of the expansion design by Rafael Vinoly.

On Thursday, the museum will launch a members-only preview of six new galleries containing nearly 500 works of art in jade, silk, bronze, gold, porcelain, ink on paper and dozens of types of stone, including the blue-gray schist of Afghanistan and the red sandstone of the Ganges Valley.

A week later, on Thursday, Jan. 2, the new wing and its treasures will open to the general public.

Ranging from monumental Hindu temple sculptures to delicate porcelain basins used by Chinese scholars to wash calligraphy brushes, the works capture the aesthetic, cultural and religious values of dozens of dynasties and empires that once reigned over a vast swath of Asia.

On view for the first time in eight long years, the collections include a stunning assortment of ancient Chinese bronze vessels; a rare, ninth-century brass statue of Buddha from Kashmir that radiates the spiritual authority of a superstar; and a monumental Cambodian sculpture of the Hindu deity Krishna saving the world from a flood by raising a mountain over his head.

Inside the new West Wing galleries: Mathura-style sculptures of the Kushana kingdom.

Prior to the museum’s expansion and renovation, the material on view in the West Wing occupied dark, confusing and overcrowded galleries in the lower level of the museum’s 1916 building – an area originally designed to house the institution’s auditorium. Some portions of the old galleries felt as if they were simply well-lighted storerooms.

Today, the same works of art are displayed under lofty 16-foot ceilings whose height suits many of the works on view, including a 16th-century Chinese calligraphy scroll unfurled to its magnificent full length of 11 feet, 3 inches.

Brushed by the poet Wen Zhengming, the scroll is filled with whipcord characters in the loose and brushy “running style” that spell out in verse the writer’s gratitude to the Jiajing Emperor for a gift.

Until now, the museum has never been able to display the work, acquired in 1998, at its full length. The ceilings in the old Chinese galleries were just too low.

Apart from the artistic riches it houses, the West Wing’s completion signals the end of the museum’s eight-year, $350 million expansion and renovation – one of the biggest recent art museum expansions in the United States.

Unfurled at full length: A 16th-century Chinese calligraphy scroll purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1998 can finally be seen at full length.

Originally conceived when Robert Bergman was the museum’s director in the late 1990s, the project grew in scale and estimated cost from $170 million to $258 million and ultimately to the eye-popping final amount.

The project evolved through two recessions, Bergman’s death in 1999, the departures of three subsequent directors and the partial completion of a capital campaign now just under $90 million shy of its goal.

Museum Expansion

What: Chinese, Indian and Southeast Asian Galleries

Where: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd., Cleveland

When: Member previews, regular hours, Dec. 26-31. General public opening, Jan. 2.

Admission: Free. Call 216-421-7340 or go to www.clevelandart.org.

Getting to the finish line in terms of construction has not been pretty. What should have been a moment of triumph for the museum this month has been marred by the resignation of David Franklin as director in October after he violated a policy that required him to disclose to trustees that he had had an extramarital affair with an employee.

Franklin’s abrupt departure caused the museum to take the unusual step of appointing Fred Bidwell, a philanthropist, donor and trustee, as interim director – a position filled during previous transitions by high-ranking staff members or, in 2009-10, by Deborah Gribbon, former director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Gribbon is back now for a second sojourn at the museum, this time as interim chief curator. Meanwhile, a search for the museum’s fourth new director since 1999 is under way.

The museum’s next leader will take the helm of an institution that has been physically transformed on the eve of its centennial in 2016.

Robert P. Bergman, shown in 1993, the year he became director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, laid the groundwork for the museum's expansion, now completed two decades later.

Prior to its expansion, the museum was a labyrinthine warren. Curators had to install artworks in hallways and lobbies; the museum catered special events by setting out tables and chairs under the low ceiling of the gloomy North Lobby, which seems to compress the space like a hand pressing down on one’s head.

The expansion and renovation has increased the museum’s size by 51 percent, to 588,000 square feet of space that includes a spectacular 39,000-square-foot central atrium used for parties, concerts and other gatherings that are making the museum a center of community life.

Permanent-collection galleries – arrayed on all four sides of the atrium – are spacious, easy to find and far roomier than before. Visitors can navigate easily by using mezzanine walkways that overlook the atrium on three sides.

To achieve its new form, the museum agreed in 2002 to architect Rafael Vinoly’s audacious suggestion that it should tear down two additions from 1958 and 1983 because they were poorly planned and not worth preserving.

After the demolitions, the museum added the new East and West wings designed by Vinoly. The wings clasp the east and west ends of the museum’s original 1916 building, a neoclassical palace designed by the Cleveland firm of Hubbell and Benes, and the 1971 Brutalist-style addition designed by Bauhaus master Marcel Breuer.

On the inside, the new wings and the earlier sections of the museum enclose the atrium. On the outside, the wings face East Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive with facades striped in horizontal bands of marble and granite that echo the facades of Breuer’s 1971 addition.

To help keep cash flowing to contractors during construction, the museum received court permission for the second time in its history to tap endowment funds originally restricted to the purchase of art.

Cuyahoga County Probate Court Judge Anthony Russo ruled in late 2009 that the museum could draw up to $75 million in income from four art-purchase endowment funds for up to 10 years to aid the expansion project.

The museum also borrowed $165 million for construction in bonds issued through the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority in 2005 and 2010. The port served as a conduit for the borrowing; the full faith and credit of the museum are on the line.

Bronze plaques in many galleries feature the names of donors who poured millions of dollars into the museum.

The Solstice summer celebration at the Cleveland Museum of Art has become a fixture on the city's calendar.

As of Dec. 18, the institution had raised $260.2 million in cash and pledges to pay for the expansion and renovation. But that leaves another $89.8 million to raise in a region with a shrinking donor base and many financially hungry arts and cultural organizations – not to mention hospitals, universities and other nonprofits.

Apart from a price tag that has made the museum’s venture what it calls the biggest cultural project in Ohio history, the project came with a heavy artistic cost.

That was paid by Clevelanders who lost access to large parts of the collection for up to eight years.

Almost as soon as the museum’s board voted in 2005 to commence with the expansion, the institution started closing its galleries in a sequence that culminated in a complete shutdown for the first 10 months of 2006.

Since then, the permanent collection has re-emerged, one department at a time, as various portions reached completion.

In early 2014, cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer will take a deeper look at the expansion, including an assessment of its design and its impact on the museum’s operations and endowment.

For now, it’s clear that the experience of viewing art has changed dramatically for the better. That’s especially true for the Chinese, Indian and Southeast Asian collections, which have had to remain in storage longer than any other major part of the museum’s holdings.

Having literally come up from the museum’s basement, the contents of the new West Wing galleries for the first time command the prominent position within the institution’s footprint that they merit.

Sherman Lee directed the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1958 to 1983. It's still his museum in many ways.

It’s fitting that the Chinese, Indian and Southeast Asian collections represent the finale of the project, because they were assembled under Sherman Lee, the museum’s legendary director from 1958 to 1983, a widely respected expert on Asian art.

Just as George Szell shaped the Cleveland Orchestra in the 1950s and ’60s and turned it into the internationally respected ensemble it is today, Lee raised the museum to renown.

Acquisitions made during his watch – especially in Asian art – account for a good deal of the prestige the museum enjoys around the world.

For the past eight years, the works now on view in the West Wing have been accessible only on the printed pages of museum catalogs or in digital images on the museum’s website.

Now they’re back where they belong, and where Lee wanted them to be: where everyone can see them. Alexander, Marco Polo and Magellan would be envious.