After completing the series on India, I decided to focus my attention on another country which is very close to Singapore and is a favourite travel destination from the island. So over the next few months, let us explore the Malaysian peninsula as well as the eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak. I will start with a short history of the country and then the first state I will explore will be the state of Johor, which is the closest to Singapore and historically has been attached to the island for centuries.

Consisting of 13 states and three federal territories, Malaysia is separated by the South China Sea into two regions – Peninsular Malaysia which has 11 states and two federal territories and Borneo’s East Malaysia which has two states and one federal territory. Peninsular Malaysia shares a land and maritime border with Thailand and maritime borders with Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia. East Malaysia shares land and maritime borders with Brunei and Indonesia, and a maritime border with the Philippines and Vietnam. Kuala Lumpur is the national capital, the country’s largest city, and the seat of the legislative branch of the federal government. Putrajaya is the administrative centre, which represents the seat of both the executive branch and the judicial branch of the federal government. With a population of over 32 million, Malaysia is the world’s 45^th-most populous country. The southernmost point of continental Eurasia is in Tanjung Piai. Located in the tropics, Malaysia is one of 17 megadiverse countries, home to numerous endemic species.

A multiethnic and multicultural country, half of Malaysia’s population is ethnically Malay minorities of Chinese, Indians, and indigenous peoples. The country’s official language is Malaysian Malay, a standard form of the Malay language while English remains an active second language. Officially an Islamic country, the country’s constitution grants freedom of religion to non-Muslims. The government is modelled on the Westminster parliamentary system, and the legal system is based on common law. The head of state is an elected monarch, chosen from among the nine state sultans every five years and the head of government is the Prime Minister.

The Malaysian economy has traditionally been fuelled by its natural resources but is expanding in the sectors of science, tourism, commerce and medical tourism. Malaysia has a newly industrialised market economy, ranked third-largest in Southeast Asia and 36^th-largest in the world. It is a founding member of ASEAN, EAS, and OIC and a member of APEC, the Commonwealth, and the Non-Aligned Movement.

The name Malaysia is a combination of the word Malays and the Latin-Greek suffix ia which can be translated as the land of the Malays. The origin of the word Melayu is subject to various theories. It may derive from the Sanskrit Himalaya, referring to areas high in the mountains, or Malaiyur-pura, meaning mountain town. Another similar theory claims its origin lies in the Tamil words malai and ur meaning mountain and city, land, respectively. Another theory is that it comes from a Javanese word meaning to run, from which a river, the Sungai Melayu or the Melayu River, was named due to its strong current. Similar-sounding variants have also appeared in accounts older than the 11^th century, as toponyms for areas in Sumatra or referring to a larger region around the Strait of Malacca. The Sanskrit text Vayu Purana thought to have been in existence since the first millennium CE, mentioned a land named Malayadvipa which was identified by certain scholars as the modern Malay peninsula.  Other notable accounts are by the 2^nd-century Ptolemy’s Geographia which used the name Malayu Kulon for the west coast of the Golden Chersonese, and the 7^th-century Yijing’s account of Malayu.

At some point, the Melayu Kingdom took its name from the Sungai Melayu. Melayu then became associated with Srivijaya, and remained associated with various parts of Sumatra, especially Palembang, where the founder of the Malacca Sultanate is thought to have come from. It is only thought to have developed into an ethnonym as Malacca became a regional power in the 15^th century. Islamisation established an ethnoreligious identity in Malacca, with the term Melayu beginning to appear interchangeable with Melakans. It may have specifically referred to local Malays speakers thought loyal to the Malaccan Sultan. The initial Portuguese use of Malayos reflected this, referring only to the ruling people of Malacca. The prominence of traders from Malacca led Melayu to be associated with Muslim traders, and from there became associated with the wider cultural and linguistic group. Malacca and later Johor claimed they were the centre of Malay culture, a position supported by the British which led to the term Malay becoming more usually linked to the Malay peninsula rather than Sumatra.

Malaysia has its origins in the Malay kingdoms, which, from the 18^th century on, became subject to the British Empire, along with the British Straits Settlements protectorate. During World War II, British Malaya, along with other nearby British and American colonies, was occupied by the Empire of Japan. Following three years of occupation, peninsular Malaysia was unified as the Malayan Union in 1946 and then restructured as the Federation of Malaya in 1948. The country achieved independence on 31 August 1957. Independent Malaya united with the then British crown colonies of North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore on 16 September 1963 to become Malaysia. In August 1965, Singapore was expelled from the federation and became a separate independent country.

Before the onset of European colonisation, the Malay Peninsula was known natively as Tanah Melayu or the Malay Land. Under a racial classification created by a German scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the natives of maritime Southeast Asia were grouped into a single category, the Malay race. Following the expedition of French navigator Jules Dumont d’Urville to Oceania in 1826, he later proposed the terms of Malaysia, Micronesia and Melanesia to the Société de Géographie in 1831, distinguishing these Pacific cultures and island groups from the existing term Polynesia. In 1850, the English ethnologist George Samuel Windsor Earl, writing in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, proposed naming the islands of Southeast Asia as Melayunesia or Indunesia, favouring the former. The name Malaysia gained some use to label what is now the Malay Archipelago. In modern terminology, Malay remains the name of an ethnoreligious group of Austronesian people predominantly inhabiting the Malay Peninsula and portions of the adjacent islands of Southeast Asia, including the east coast of Sumatra, the coast of Borneo, and smaller islands that lie between these areas.

The state that gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1957 took the name the Federation of Malaya, chosen in preference to other potential names such as Langkasuka, after the historic kingdom located at the upper section of the Malay Peninsula in the first millennium CE. The name Malaysia was adopted in 1963 when the existing states of the Federation of Malaya, plus Singapore, North Borneo and Sarawak formed a new federation. One theory posits the name was chosen so that sia represented the inclusion of Singapore, North Borneo, and Sarawak to Malaya in 1963. Politicians in the Philippines contemplated renaming their state Malaysia before the modern country took the name.

Evidence of modern human habitation in Malaysia dates back 40,000 years. In the Malay Peninsula, the first inhabitants are thought to be Negritos with traders and settlers from India and China arriving as early as the first century AD, establishing trading ports and coastal towns in the second and third centuries. Their presence resulted in strong Indian and Chinese influences on the local cultures, and the people of the Malay Peninsula adopted the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Sanskrit inscriptions appear as early as the fourth or fifth century. The Kingdom of Langkasuka arose around the second century in the northern area of the Malay Peninsula, lasting until about the 15^th century. Between the 7^th and 13^th centuries, much of the southern Malay Peninsula was part of the maritime Srivijayan empire. By the 13^th and 14^th centuries, the Majapahit empire had successfully wrested control over most of the peninsula and the Malay Archipelago from Srivijaya. In the early 15^th century, Parameswara, a runaway king of the former Kingdom of Singapura linked to the old Srivijayan court, founded the Malacca Sultanate. The spread of Islam increased following Parameswara’s conversion to that religion. Malacca was an important commercial centre during this time, attracting trade from around the region. In 1511, Malacca was conquered by Portugal, after which it was taken by the Dutch in 1641.

In 1786, the British Empire established a presence in Malaya, when the Sultan of Kedah leased Penang Island to the British East India Company. The British obtained the town of Singapore in 1819, and in 1824 took control of Malacca following the Anglo-Dutch Treaty. By 1826, the British directly controlled Penang, Malacca, Singapore, and the island of Labuan, which they established as the crown colony of the Straits Settlements. By the 20^th century, the states of Pahang, Selangor, Perak, and Negeri Sembilan, known together as the Federated Malay States, had British residents appointed to advise the Malay rulers, to whom the rulers were bound to defer by treaty. The remaining five states on the peninsula, known as the Unfederated Malay States, while not directly under British rule, also accepted British advisers around the turn of the 20^th century. Development on the peninsula and Borneo were generally separate until the 19^th century. Under British rule, the immigration of Chinese and Indians to serve as labourers was encouraged. The area that is now Sabah came under British control as North Borneo when both the Sultan of Brunei and the Sultan of Sulu transferred their respective territorial rights of ownership, between 1877 and 1878. In 1842, Sarawak was ceded by the Sultan of Brunei to James Brooke, whose successors ruled as the White Rajahs over an independent kingdom until 1946, when it became a crown colony.

In the Second World War, the Japanese Army invaded and occupied Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore for over three years. During this time, ethnic tensions were raised and nationalism grew. Popular support for independence increased after Malaya was reconquered by Allied forces. Post-war British plans to unite the administration of Malaya under a single crown colony called the Malayan Union met with strong opposition from the Malays, who opposed the weakening of the Malay rulers and the granting of citizenship to the ethnic Chinese. The Malayan Union, established in 1946, and consisting of all the British possessions in the Malay Peninsula except Singapore, was quickly dissolved and replaced on 1 February 1948 by the Federation of Malaya, which restored the autonomy of the rulers of the Malay states under British protection.

During this time, the ethnically Chinese rebels under the leadership of the Malayan Communist Party launched guerrilla operations designed to force the British out of Malaya. The Malayan Emergency which took place between 1948 and 1960 involved a long anti-insurgency campaign by Commonwealth troops in Malaya. On 31 August 1957, Malaya became an independent member of the Commonwealth of Nations and after this, a plan was put in place to federate Malaya with the crown colonies of North Borneo, which joined as Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore. The date of the federation was planned to be 31 August 1963 to coincide with the anniversary of Malayan independence; however, the federation was delayed until 16 September 1963 for a United Nations survey of support for the federation in Sabah and Sarawak, called for by parties opposed to federation including Indonesia’s Sukarno and the Sarawak United Peoples’ Party, to be completed.

The Federation brought heightened tensions including a conflict with Indonesia as well as continual conflicts against the Communists in Borneo and the Malayan Peninsula, which escalated to the Sarawak Communist Insurgency and Second Malayan Emergency together with several other issues such as the cross-border attacks into North Borneo by Moro pirates from the southern islands of the Philippines, Singapore being expelled from the Federation in 1965, and racial strife. This strife culminated in the 13 May race riots in 1969. After the riots, the controversial New Economic Policy was launched by Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, trying to increase the share of the economy held by the Bumiputera. Under Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad there was a period of rapid economic growth and urbanization beginning in the 1980s. The economy shifted from being agriculturally based to one based on manufacturing and industry. Numerous mega-projects were completed, such as the Petronas Towers, the North–South Expressway, the Multimedia Super Corridor, and the new federal administrative capital of Putrajaya. However, in the late 1990s, the Asian financial crisis almost caused the collapse of the currency and the stock and property markets, although they later recovered. The 1MDB scandal was a major global corruption scandal that implicated then-Prime Minister Najib Razak in 2015. The scandal contributed to the first change in the ruling political party since independence in the 2018 general election. In the 2020s, the country was gripped by a political crisis that coincided with health and economic crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This was then followed by an earlier general election in November 2022, which resulted in the first hung parliament in the nation’s history. Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition won 82 seats and former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s Perikatan Nasional (PN) gained 73 seats. Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition was the biggest loser, securing just 30 seats in the 222-member parliament. On 24 November 2022, Anwar Ibrahim was sworn in as the 10th Prime Minister of Malaysia.

The long, narrow, and rugged Malay Peninsula extends to the south and southwest from Myanmar and Thailand. The Malaysian portion of it is about 800 km long and — at its broadest east-west axis — about 320 km wide. Peninsular Malaysia is dominated by its mountainous core, which consists of many roughly parallel mountain ranges aligned north-south. Karst landscapes which are limestone hills with characteristically steep whitish-grey sides, stunted vegetation, caves created by the dissolving action of water, and subterranean passages are distinctive landmarks in central and northern Peninsular Malaysia. Bordering the mountainous core are the coastal lowlands. East Malaysia is an elongated strip of land approximately 1,125 km long with a maximum width of about 275 km. There is a mountainous backbone that forms the divide between East Malaysia and Kalimantan. Most of the summits of the ranges are between 4,000 and 7,000 feet and Mount Kinabalu towers above this mountain complex; at 13,435 feet, it is the highest peak in Malaysia and the Southeast Asian archipelago as a whole.

The characteristic vegetation of Malaysia is dense evergreen rainforest. Rainforest still covers more than two-fifths of the peninsula and some two-thirds of Sarawak and Sabah; another fraction of the country is under swamp forest. Soil type, location, and elevation produce distinctive vegetation zones: tidal swamp forest on the coast, freshwater- and peat-swamp forest on the ill-drained parts of the coastal plains, lowland rainforest on the well-drained parts of the coastal plains and foothills up to an elevation of about 2,000 feet (600 metres), and submontane and montane forest (also called cloud forest) in higher areas. The highly leached and sandy soils of parts of central Sarawak and the coast support an open heathlike forest commonly called kerangas forest.

The flora of the Malaysian rainforest is among the richest in the world. There are several thousand species of vascular plants, including more than 2,000 species of trees, as well as the parasitic monster flower, Rafflesia arnoldii of the Rafflesiaceae family, which bears the world’s largest known flower, measuring nearly 3 feet in diameter. One acre of forest may have as many as 100 different species of trees, as well as shrubs, herbs, and creepers. The forest canopy is so dense that little sunlight can penetrate it. Much of the original rainforest has been destroyed by clearances made for agricultural or commercial purposes, by severe wind and lightning storms, and by indigenous peoples clearing it for shifting cultivation. The forests and scrublands are inhabited by a large variety of animal life including elephants, tigers, Malayan gaurs, Sumatran rhinoceroses, tapirs, wild pigs, and many species of deer. Crocodiles, monitor lizards, and cobras also are indigenous to the country, while green sea turtles and giant leatherback turtles nest on the beaches of the east coast. Animal life in East Malaysia is even more varied than it is on the peninsula. In addition to the peninsular species, East Malaysia is also the home of fast-disappearing orangutans and rhinoceroses, sun bears, also called honey bears, and unique proboscis monkeys — a reddish tree-dwelling species. There also are vast numbers of cave swifts, whose nests are regularly collected and sold as the main ingredient of Chinese bird’s nest soup.

The people of Malaysia are unevenly distributed between Peninsular and East Malaysia, with the vast majority living in Peninsular Malaysia. The population shows great ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity. The Malay Peninsula and the northern coast of Borneo, both situated at the nexus of one of the major maritime trade routes of the world, have long been the meeting place of peoples from other parts of Asia. As a result, the population of Malaysia, like that of Southeast Asia as a whole, shows great ethnographic complexity. Islam, Malaysia’s official religion, is followed by about three-fifths of the population and is one of the most important factors distinguishing a Malay from a non-Malay, and, by law, all Malays are Muslim.

About one-fourth of Malaysia’s population is rural. The basic administrative unit in both East and Peninsular Malaysia is the kampung which is the village, or a community of houses. Much of the population of East Malaysia still lives in rural areas, where a great variety of settlement types is encountered. This variety is a direct reflection of the considerable ethnic diversity of the population and of the mixture of indigenous and immigrant groups that have settled in the rural areas. The cities and large towns of Peninsular Malaysia were built during the colonial and postcolonial periods and are distributed mainly in the tin and rubber belt along the west side of the peninsula. Before World War II, there was a free flow of people to and from both Peninsular and East Malaysia, and the rate of population growth was greatly influenced by a net surplus from immigration. However, a series of laws passed since 1945, particularly after the political separation of Singapore in 1963, restricted the entry of immigrants from all countries. Thus, legal immigration has long ceased to be a major cause of population growth.

Malaysia’s economy has been transformed since 1970 from one based primarily on the export of raw materials like rubber and tin to one that is among the strongest, most diversified, and fastest-growing in Southeast Asia. Since the early 1970s the government has championed a social and economic restructuring strategy, first known as the New Economic Policy or NEP and later as the New Development Policy or NDP, that has sought to strike a balance between the goals of economic growth and the redistribution of wealth. Agriculture, forestry, and fishing once formed the basis of the Malaysian economy, but between 1970 and the early 21^st century their contribution to the country’s gross domestic product or GDP declined from roughly one-third to less than one-tenth. Rubber and palm oil are the dominant cash crops and by the early 21^st century, Malaysia had become one of the world’s top producers of palm oil. Other common cash crops include cocoa, pepper, coffee, tea, various fruits, and coconuts. The extensive forests of both Peninsular Malaysia and East Malaysia are heavily exploited for their timber. Malaysia’s most valuable mineral resources are its reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Crude oil, refined petroleum, and, more recently, liquefied natural gas together account for a major portion of the country’s commodity export earnings. Almost all the major oil and gas fields are offshore — off the east coast of the peninsula, the northeast coast of Sarawak, and the west coast of Sabah.

Most of the peninsular states are led by hereditary rulers. Johor, Kedah, Kelantan, Pahang, Perak, Selangor, and Terengganu have sultans, while Perlis has a raja or King, and Negeri Sembilan is ruled by the Yang di-Pertuan Besar or the chief ruler. The heads of state of Melaka, Penang, Sarawak, and Sabah, known as Yang di-Pertuan Negeri or the state ruler are appointed to office.

Malaysia has a rich cultural life, much of which revolves around the traditional festivities of its diverse population. The major Muslim holidays are Hari Raya Puasa or the Holiday of Fasting or Aidilfitri, to celebrate the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, and Hari Raya Haji or the Holiday of the Pilgrimage, or Aidiladha, to celebrate the culmination of the season of pilgrimage to Mecca. Buddhists honour the life of the Buddha on Hari Wesak or Wesak Day, and Chinese Malaysians celebrate the Chinese New Year. Deepavali or Diwali, a Hindu festival of lights spanning several days, is observed by many Indian Malaysians, while Christmas is the principal holiday of the Christian community. On most of these holidays, it is customary to host an open house, where guests are treated to Malaysian delicacies and hospitality. A holiday that spans all ethnic groups and religions is Hari Kebangsaan or National Day, a celebration of Malaysia’s independence on August 31. The states have their holidays. Sarawak, for instance, celebrates Gawai Dayak or the Dayak Festival. Rooted in the harvest rituals and festivities or gawai of the Iban and Bidayuh peoples, this holiday broadly honours the state’s non-Malay indigenous heritage.

Now that we know a fair bit about Malaysia, let’s explore the different states, starting from the one closest to Singapore – the state of Johor.