Soon after Qatar’s independence, Sheikh Khalifa and the ruling elites wanted to erect a national museum. In 1975, the Qatar National Museum (QNM) was established, focusing on the geological origins of the Qatari peninsula, archaeological artifacts and life of the Bedu people. It was built using the old (1901) palace of Sheikh Abdullah Al Thani, son of Jassim, widely considered the founder of modern Qatar. But after a bloodless coup in 1995, Qatar started to develop a different branding strategy, led by the Hamad/Tamim duo, and the legacy of Sheikh Khalifa started to vanish. In 2002, the QNM was closed for renovation and in 2007 it was set to be substituted by another project – what ended up being the new National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ). It has been erected in the same place that the QNM, and the only piece that has been preserved is Sheikh Abdullah’s palace. The NMoQ, then, establishes a dialogue with Sheikh Khalifa’s legacy but also with the whole lineage of the Al Thani. In this paper I analyse the relation of the NMoQ with the previous QNM and, in particular, with Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani’s palace, analysing if Qatari leaders develop a personalist apparatus through the institutions that they create, and if the idea of the nation has changed since independence. My main sources include the initial plans of these museums (including parts that were not included in the final execution), leaflets and press releases which create and spread a discourse around the museums, the collections they hold (particularly the distinctions between Bedouin/urban and old/modern), the treatment of heritage sites during the development of the QNM and the NMoQ (the way they restored Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani’s palace and the use they made of it) and interviews with some people involved in both projects. Some early conclusions of these ‘creative preservation’, or ‘selective erasure’ processes are that Khalifa’s legacy has been mostly erased in parallel with a shift in tribal alliances with the ruling family, a phenomenon clearly related to a personalist approach to power of the Hamad/Tamim tandem.