The collection began with one person. Pekka Airaksinen, born in 1945, made his name in the late 1960s as a co-founder of The Sperm, a Finnish group that fused free jazz, avant-garde noise and psychedelic pop into performances provocative enough to get its members arrested. The band came apart in the early 1970s. Airaksinen turned to Buddhism and stopped making music altogether.

He started buying Tibetan art in 1974. When he returned to composing in the mid-1980s, the record that announced it was called Buddhas of Golden Light — free jazz played against a Roland drum machine, an odd hybrid that has aged rather better than most of what surrounded it. In the 1990s he founded his own label, Dharmakustannus, releasing albums that drifted between ambient, house, new age and improvisation. He died in 2019. The collection outlived him.

Most of what hangs and stands in Alastaro was acquired in Nepal rather than in Tibet itself, which is its own quiet piece of twentieth-century history: the diaspora carried the tradition, and the market for it, across the Himalaya. The statues are largely bronze under gold plating, made by metalworking methods that have changed very little in centuries. The thangkas — scroll paintings on cotton, finished with gold leaf — are the heart of it. Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, appears among them. So does Milarepa, the eleventh-century yogi whose life story of violence, remorse and years of solitary practice is among the most retold in Tibetan Buddhism. Other cloths set out episodes from the life of the Buddha, so that a single hanging carries an entire narrative. Around two hundred items in all: paintings, statues, ritual objects, instruments, jewellery.

The art arrived here decades before the museum did. A dharma centre had been operating at the site long before anything opened to the public, teaching meditation and yoga under the Helsinki-based Buddhalainen Dharmakeskus, which still owns the building. It kept a deliberately low profile, and part of the reason was the attitude of the Evangelical Lutheran Church — no small thing in a municipality where roughly eighty per cent of residents are members and the congregation traces itself to the 1420s. The centre was never sealed off; visitors who knew about it could come. It simply did not advertise. That changed in June 2017, when the Tibet Art Center opened formally as a museum. The teaching carries on alongside the exhibits, so that the old school functions at once as gallery, dharma school, meditation centre and yoga school.

Alastaro spent 140 years as its own municipality — established in 1869, folded into Loimaa in 2009 together with Mellilä — and it has not entirely stopped behaving like one. It is a big, thin place: 258 square kilometres, fewer than three thousand residents at the merger. The Loimijoki cuts through it, and its better-known landmark is a motor racing circuit, which gives the local tourist map an unusually wide span between a race track and a room full of thangkas. Settlement here is nothing new either. Dwelling sites excavated at Mälläinen are more than three thousand years old, which makes both the schoolhouse and the Buddhas recent arrivals.