Qualla: Sarawak State Museum

Sarawak State Museum: Introduction

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shoestring at wts.wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before the Sarawak State Museum had a building, it had a room above a vegetable market. Specimens collected from Borneo's rivers and jungles -- birds, insects, indigenous crafts -- sat in an improvised gallery while the colonial government figured out where to put them. Hugh Brooke Low's collections from the Rajang River had outgrown a clock tower at a government office, and the overflow had nowhere else to go. That makeshift arrangement above the market stalls, open to anyone curious enough to climb the stairs, was Borneo's first public museum. The proper building that replaced it in 1891 still stands on the Kuching waterfront, its dormer windows and brick pillars a quietly incongruous piece of Queen Anne architecture transplanted to the equatorial tropics.

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Image: Shoestring at wts.wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sarawak State Museum: A Museum Born from Curiosity and Overflow

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ho Ah Chon, Public domain. The museum's founding in 1888 reflected the peculiar enthusiasms of Sarawak's Brooke dynasty, the English family who ruled the territory as White Rajahs. Charles Brooke, the second Rajah, requested land from the Anglican Mission as early as 1880 to house the growing collections. ...

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Image: Ho Ah Chon | Public domain

Sarawak State Museum: Surviving the Occupation

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 愛子棋枰, CC BY-SA 4.0. When Japanese forces occupied British Borneo during World War II, the museum's fate hung on a single person's sympathies. A Japanese officer was assigned to direct the institution, and unlike what happened to many colonial buildings across Southeast Asia, he chose to protect it. ...

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Image: 愛子棋枰 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sarawak State Museum: Longhouses, Turtles, and Scientific Journals

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CW.TAN, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum's ground floor holds Sarawak's natural history: expertly mounted specimens of the territory's reptiles, mammals, and birds, alongside a Shell exhibition on the petroleum industry that became central to Sarawak's modern economy. Upstairs, the ethnographic collections te...

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Image: CW.TAN | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sarawak State Museum: The Borneo Cultures Museum and What Comes Next

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cerevisae, CC BY-SA 4.0. In March 2022, the museum's ambitions materialized in a massive new building: the Borneo Cultures Museum, now the largest museum complex in Malaysia and the second largest in Southeast Asia after Singapore's National Museum. A bridge connects the new structure to the original 189...

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Image: Cerevisae | CC BY-SA 4.0