Qualla: The Chimney of Labuan

The Chimney of Labuan: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Nobody knows what the chimney was for. That is the first thing the museum tells you, and perhaps the most honest thing any museum has ever admitted. The tower stands 32 meters tall in the jungle near Kubong, on the northern tip of Labuan island, built from more than 23,000 unplastered red bricks imported from Britain sometime in the early 1900s. It has two arch-shaped doors facing west and south, a hole in its side, and twelve layers of bricks buried beneath it that archaeologists discovered in 1997. What it lacks is a clear purpose. The British North Borneo Chartered Company mined coal from this area for over sixty years, and the obvious assumption is that the tower served the mining operation. But excavations found no tunnel beneath it, and no traces of smoke or burning inside. The chimney, it turns out, may never have been a chimney at all.

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Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Chimney of Labuan: Black Gold at the Edge of Empire

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Coal brought the British to Labuan. Following the Anglo-Brunei Treaty of 1847, the Sultan of Brunei ceded the island to Britain in perpetuity, and James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, became its first governor. The Eastern Archipelago Company received a Royal Charter that sa...

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Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Chimney of Labuan: A Tower Without an Explanation

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Limzh8835, CC BY-SA 4.0. The chimney survived long after the industry that supposedly built it collapsed. Its rectangular form and British architectural style mark it as colonial work, but colonial records offer no definitive account of its construction or function. The most intuitive theory, that it ven...

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Image: Limzh8835 | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Chimney of Labuan: Digging for Answers

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Limzh8835, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1997, archaeologists conducted extensive excavation work around the tower's base. The twelve layers of buried brickwork they uncovered suggested the structure was older and more substantial than it appeared above ground. Soil stabilization work was carried out the same year to...

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Image: Limzh8835 | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Chimney of Labuan: Standing Watch Over Nothing

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Today the chimney stands in a clearing surrounded by the regenerated jungle that reclaimed the mining district after the British departed. It is the most visible relic of Labuan's coal era, an industry that shaped the island's colonial history for six decades but left behind litt...

Read more: The Chimney of Labuan on Qualla

Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas | CC BY-SA 3.0