Malaysia

• 1. Introduction

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  Malaysia sits split in two, divided by the South China Sea into Peninsular Malaysia on mainland Southeast Asia and East Malaysia on the island of Borneo. One country, thirteen states, three federal territories, and two land masses that do not touch. Kuala Lumpur is the largest city and the seat of the legislature, yet the executive and judicial branches work from a different capital entirely, the purpose-built city of Putrajaya. Over 34 million people live here, making it the world's 42nd-most populous country. Its king is not born to the throne but elected, chosen from among nine hereditary rulers every five years. How does a nation hold together across an ocean, with a monarch on rotation and a population split between Malays, Chinese, Indians, and the indigenous peoples of Borneo? Where did the very name come from, and why was it nearly given to the Philippines instead? The answers run through a sultanate that controlled one of the world's busiest sea lanes, a war fought over a chieftaincy and tin, and forests older than the dinosaurs that are now being logged toward collapse.

• 2. Land Of The Malays

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  The name Malaysia joins the word Malays with the Latin-Greek suffix that means 'land of'. Long before any modern state, the Sanskrit text Vayu Purana described a land called 'Malayadvipa', which some scholars matched to the Malay Peninsula. Ptolemy's 2nd-century Geographia used the name Malayu Kulon for the west coast of the Golden Chersonese, and a 7th-century account by Yijing recorded a place called Malayu.

  The word Melayu began as a place, then narrowed into a people. The Melayu Kingdom took its name from the Sungai Melayu, a river, and the term later attached itself to Srivijaya and to parts of Sumatra, especially Palembang. Only as Malacca rose to power in the 15th century did Melayu harden into an ethnonym. The early Portuguese borrowed it as Malayos, applying it strictly to the ruling people of Malacca.

  European explorers gave the wider name its modern shape. After his 1826 expedition to Oceania, the French navigator Jules Dumont d'Urville proposed the terms Malaysia, Micronesia, and Melanesia to the Societe de Geographie in 1831. He described Malaysia as an area commonly known as the East Indies. In 1850, the English ethnologist George Samuel Windsor Earl floated the names Melayunesia and Indunesia for the islands of Southeast Asia, favouring the first.

  When independence came in 1957, the new state chose to be the Federation of Malaya, picked over rival candidates including Malaysia itself and Langkasuka. The name Malaysia waited until 1963. One theory holds that the syllable si was meant to fold in Singapore, North Borneo, and Sarawak. Politicians in the Philippines had even weighed taking the name Malaysia for their own country before this one claimed it.

• 3. Sultanate And Sea Lane

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  Evidence of modern human habitation in Malaysia reaches back 40,000 years, with the Negritos thought to be the first inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula. Traders from India and China arrived as early as the first century AD, and the people of the peninsula adopted Hinduism and Buddhism. The Kingdom of Langkasuka rose around the second century and lasted until roughly the 15th. Between the 7th and 13th centuries, much of the southern peninsula belonged to the maritime Srivijayan empire, later displaced by the Majapahit.

  Parameswara changed everything in the early 15th century. A runaway king tied to the old Srivijayan court, he founded the Malacca Sultanate, and his conversion to Islam accelerated the religion's spread. Malacca became a major commercial centre, drawing trade from across the region. That prominence made it a target. Portugal conquered Malacca in 1511, the Dutch took it in 1641, and the British seized it in 1824 under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty.

  The Strait of Malacca explains much of this hunger. Lying between Sumatra and Peninsular Malaysia, it is one of the most important thoroughfares in global commerce, carrying 40% of the world's trade. Whoever held its ports held a chokepoint of the maritime economy. The Strait still anchors the country's role as a trading nation today.

• 4. Residents And Rajahs

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  In 1786, the Sultan of Kedah leased Penang Island to the British East India Company, the first British foothold in Malaya. Britain gained Singapore in 1819, and by 1826 directly controlled Penang, Malacca, Singapore, and Labuan as the crown colony of the Straits Settlements. On Borneo, the story turned stranger. In 1842 the Sultan of Brunei ceded Sarawak to James Brooke, and his successors ruled as the White Rajahs over an independent kingdom until 1946. The area now called Sabah passed to British control as North Borneo when the Sultans of Brunei and Sulu transferred their rights between 1877 and 1878.

  The Klang War of 1867 to 1874 began as a quarrel over a chieftaincy. Raja Mahadi rejected the appointment of Raja Abdullah by Sultan Abdul Samad of Selangor. The fight pulled in rival Chinese secret societies, the Ghee Hin Kongsi largely backing Mahadi and the Hai San backing Abdullah, along with Bugis-descended and Malay chiefs. When Mahadi captured the Klang Fort and Abdullah fled to Malacca, the fighting disrupted tin production and trade in the Klang Valley.

  The neighbouring Larut Wars of 1861 to 1874 wrecked tin-rich districts in Perak and alarmed British merchants. Appeals from Malay chiefs and British worry over disorder led to the Pangkor Treaty of 1874, which planted British residents across the Malay states. Frank Swettenham later framed it gently. He wrote that the British came in at the invitation of the Rulers to teach them a better form of government. By the 20th century, Pahang, Selangor, Perak, and Negeri Sembilan formed the Federated Malay States, each with a British resident advising rulers bound by treaty to defer to that advice.

• 5. From Malaya To Hung Parliament

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  The Japanese Army invaded and occupied Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore for over three years during the Second World War, raising ethnic tensions and feeding nationalism. After Allied forces retook Malaya, British plans to merge the territories into a single Malayan Union met fierce Malay opposition, because it weakened the Malay rulers and offered citizenship to ethnic Chinese. Established in 1946, the Union was dissolved and replaced on the 1st of February 1948 by the Federation of Malaya, which restored the rulers' autonomy.

  The Malayan Emergency of 1948 to 1960 pitted Commonwealth troops against mostly ethnically Chinese rebels led by the Malayan Communist Party. On the 31st of August 1957, Malaya became an independent member of the Commonwealth. A plan then took shape to unite it with North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore. The federation was meant to begin on the 31st of August 1963 to echo independence day, but a United Nations survey of support in Sabah and Sarawak, demanded by opponents such as Indonesia's Sukarno, pushed the date to the 16th of September 1963.

  The new federation arrived with conflict. There was confrontation with Indonesia, communist insurgency in Borneo and on the peninsula, cross-border raids into Sabah by Moro pirates, and the separation of Singapore in 1965. Racial strife peaked in the 13th of May race riots of 1969. Afterward, Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak launched the New Economic Policy to raise the bumiputera share of the economy. Under Mahathir Mohamad from the 1980s, rapid growth shifted the economy from agriculture to manufacturing, and mega-projects rose, among them the Petronas Towers and Putrajaya itself.

  The 1MDB scandal struck in 2015, implicating then-Prime Minister Najib Razak. It helped drive the first change in the ruling party since independence at the 2018 election. After the political and pandemic crises of the early 2020s, the November 2022 election produced the nation's first hung parliament. On the 24th of November 2022, Anwar Ibrahim was sworn in as the 10th Prime Minister, leading a grand coalition government.

• 6. A King On Rotation

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  The head of state is the King, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, elected to a five-year term by and from the nine hereditary rulers of the Malay states. The other four states have titular Governors and take no part in the choice. By informal agreement the throne rotates among the nine, and Ibrahim Iskandar of Johor has held it since the 31st of January 2024. Since constitutional changes in 1994, the King's role has been largely ceremonial, picking ministers and members of the upper house.

  Legislative power runs through a bicameral federal parliament. The 222-member House of Representatives is elected for a maximum five-year term from single-member constituencies. The Senate seats 70 members for three-year terms, with 26 elected by the 13 state assemblies and 44 appointed by the King on the Prime Minister's recommendation. In July 2019, a bill lowered the voting age to 18. Executive power sits with the Cabinet, led by a Prime Minister who must be a House member commanding majority support.

  Race remains a significant force in politics. Affirmative measures like the New Economic Policy and the later National Development Policy gave bumiputera, meaning Malays and the indigenous tribes, preference in employment, education, scholarships, business, and housing over Malaysian Chinese and Malaysian Indians. The policies generated greater interethnic resentment. Debate continues over whether Malaysian law should reflect Islamism or secularism, with Islamic criminal laws passed in Kelantan left unenforced by the federal government, which holds responsibility for criminal law. A Department of Justice lawsuit alleged that at least $3.5 billion tied to Najib Razak had been stolen from the 1MDB state fund.

• 7. Forests Older Than Empires

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  About two-thirds of Malaysia was covered in forest as of 2007, and some of it is believed to be 130 million years old. The country is one of 17 megadiverse nations, estimated to hold 20% of the world's animal species. It has around 210 mammal species, over 620 bird species recorded in Peninsular Malaysia, 250 reptile species, and roughly 150 species of frogs. These forests host the Rafflesia genus, the largest flowers in the world, reaching a maximum diameter of one metre.

  The land itself rises from coastal plains into mountains. Peninsular Malaysia is split by the Titiwangsa Mountains, peaking at 2,183 metres at Mount Korbu. On Borneo, the Crocker Range carries Mount Kinabalu to 4,095 metres, the tallest mountain in the country, inside one of Malaysia's four UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Sarawak holds the Mulu Caves, described as the largest cave system in the world, and the Rajang, the largest river in Malaysia. The waters around the island of Sipadan are described as the most biodiverse in the world.

  Logging has devastated this inheritance. Over 80% of Sarawak's rainforest has been logged, and more than 60% of the peninsula's forests have been cleared. Deforestation, driven mainly by the palm oil industry, has already pushed species such as Begonia eiromischa to extinction. Leatherback turtle numbers have dropped by 98% since the 1950s. The federal government is trying to cut logging by 10% each year, and 28 national parks have been established, 23 of them in East Malaysia.

• 8. A Society In Many Tongues

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  Approximately 63.5% of Malaysia's population practises Islam, the religion of the Federation, while 18.7% practise Buddhism, 9.1% Christianity, 6.1% Hinduism, and 1.3% Confucianism, Taoism, and other traditional Chinese religions. Ethnicity and faith correlate closely. The constitution defines a Malay as someone who is Muslim, speaks Malay regularly, and practises Malay customs. Muslims are obliged to follow the decisions of Syariah Courts in matters such as marriage, inheritance, divorce, and conversion.

  Language maps the same diversity. The official tongue is Malaysian Malay, a standardised form of the Malay language, written in the Latin Rumi script though the traditional Jawi script is not prohibited. English remains an active second language and is an official state language in Sarawak alongside Malay. Malaysia is home to 111 living indigenous languages, and the country contains speakers of 137 living languages in all. Iban is the main tribal language in Sarawak, while Dusunic and Kadazan languages are spoken by natives in Sabah.

  Culture has been a matter of state policy. In 1971 the government created a National Cultural Policy declaring that Malaysian culture must rest on the culture of the indigenous peoples, that Islam must play a part, and that the Malay language be promoted above others. The intervention bred resentment among non-Malays who felt their cultural freedom lessened, with Chinese and Indian associations submitting memorandums accusing the government of an undemocratic policy. The earliest known Malay writing survives on the Terengganu Stone, made in 1303, a marker that the country's oral and written traditions stretch back centuries before any of these debates began.