Malaysia is a Southeast Asian federation of 13 states and three federal territories, split by the South China Sea into Peninsular Malaysia on the Asian mainland and Malaysian Borneo (Sabah and Sarawak), and it is the only country with territory on both the Asian mainland and the Malay Archipelago. It covers 330,803 km², counted 32,447,385 people at the 2020 census, and has a king elected every five years from nine hereditary Malay rulers. Its peninsula holds Kuala Lumpur, the Petronas Towers (the world’s tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004) and a rainforest put at more than 130 million years old; its Borneo half holds Mount Kinabalu (4,095 m), the largest known cave chamber on Earth and some of the last undisturbed lowland forest in the region. The facts below follow that split, because almost every fact about Malaysia depends on which half you are standing in.
Peninsular Malaysia: Nine Sultanates and an Elected King
The peninsula is the older Malaysia. It became independent from Britain as the Federation of Malaya on 31 August 1957, the date still celebrated as Merdeka (independence) Day. It holds 11 of the 13 states, two of the three federal territories (Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya), and about 79 percent of the country’s citizens on less than 40 percent of its land. Its area is about 131,956 km², stretching 740 km from the Thai border to Tanjung Piai in Johor, the southernmost point of mainland Asia.
Nine of the peninsular states are Malay sultanates with hereditary rulers: the rulers of Johor, Kedah, Kelantan, Pahang, Perak, Selangor and Terengganu are styled sultans, Perlis has a raja, and Negeri Sembilan’s ruler is himself elected and holds the title Yang di-Pertuan Besar. Together these nine form the Conference of Rulers, which elects the national monarch, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, for a five-year term. In practice the office rotates in an order fixed by the first cycle of nine kings, which ran from 1957 to 1994. That makes Malaysia one of the world’s few elective monarchies. The 17th king, Sultan Ibrahim of Johor, was elected on 26 October 2023 and sworn in on 31 January 2024.
The other four states, Penang and Melaka on the peninsula and Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo, have no royal house. They are headed by appointed governors, which is why no ruler from Borneo can ever become king. The country’s founding states are spread out in more detail in our guide to how many states Malaysia has.
Kuala Lumpur’s Twin Towers and Merdeka 118
The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur are a pair of 88-storey skyscrapers, 451.9 m tall, designed by the Argentine-American architect César Pelli. From 1998 to 2004 they were the tallest buildings in the world, until Taipei 101 in Taiwan overtook them, and they remain the tallest twin towers ever built. Their floor plan is based on the Rub el Hizb, an eight-pointed star from Islamic art, with rounded sections added for office space.
They are no longer even the tallest in Malaysia. The Exchange 106 passed them in 2019, and Merdeka 118, whose spire was finished in December 2022 at 678.9 m, is now the second-tallest building in the world after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Its name comes from the nearby Stadium Merdeka, where Malaya’s independence was formally declared in 1957 and Malaysia was proclaimed in 1963. The capital itself has also split in two: Kuala Lumpur remains the national capital and seat of Parliament, while the prime minister’s office and the courts moved to Putrajaya, a planned administrative capital south of the city.
Taman Negara and the Titiwangsa Range
The peninsula’s backbone is the Titiwangsa Mountains, a granite range that divides the crowded west coast, where nearly all the ports and big cities lie, from the quieter east coast facing the South China Sea. Peninsular Malaysia’s highest point, Gunung Tahan at 2,187 m, sits inside Taman Negara, a 4,343 km² national park spread across Pahang, Kelantan and Terengganu. It was set up in 1938–1939 as the King George V National Park after the conservationist Theodore Hubback persuaded the three sultans to set aside the land, and was renamed Taman Negara, simply “national park” in Malay, after independence. Its forest is estimated to be more than 130 million years old, and it is one of the remaining strongholds of the Malayan tiger.
West of the mountains lies the Strait of Malacca, which separates the peninsula from Sumatra and carries an estimated 40 percent of world trade. The ports and trading cities along it, from Melaka to George Town on Penang, grew rich on that traffic long before the British arrived.
16 September 1963: How Sabah and Sarawak Joined
Malaysia as a country is younger than Malaya. Under the Malaysia Agreement signed in London, the Federation of Malaya united with the British colonies of North Borneo (renamed Sabah), Sarawak and Singapore on 16 September 1963, now marked as Malaysia Day. Singapore left less than two years later and became a sovereign state on 9 August 1965, after political and economic disputes with the federal government.
Sabah and Sarawak joined on different terms from the peninsular states. They kept wider powers over land, native customs, ports and, unusually, immigration: each state runs its own immigration controls, so even Malaysians from the peninsula must carry a passport or identity card when they arrive. Sarawak had been ruled by the Brooke family, the so-called White Rajahs, from 1841 to 1946, and North Borneo by a British chartered company, before both became Crown colonies in 1946.
Malaysian Borneo is the larger half by area. Sarawak alone covers about 124,450 km², almost the size of the whole peninsula, and is the largest state; Sabah adds about 73,904 km². Yet only about 6.2 million people lived in East Malaysia in 2025, against 27.8 million in the peninsula.
Sarawak is also the only state with a Christian majority, and both Borneo states have large native communities, such as the Iban in Sarawak and the Kadazan-Dusun in Sabah, which make their politics distinct from the Malay-majority peninsula.
Mount Kinabalu and the Sarawak Chamber
Malaysia’s highest mountain is in Sabah. Mount Kinabalu reaches 4,095 m at Low’s Peak, a figure set by a satellite re-survey in 1997 that trimmed 6 m off the old 4,101 m height. It is the highest mountain in Maritime Southeast Asia and the third-highest peak on any island on Earth. The summit is named after Hugh Low, the British colonial official who made the first recorded ascent of the summit plateau in March 1851 with a Dusun guide, Lemaing of Kampung Kiau; Low judged the highest pinnacle unclimbable, and it was first reached by the zoologist John Whitehead in 1888. Geologically it is a granodiorite pluton, a mass of once-molten rock that pushed up through folded sediments.
Kinabalu Park, 754 km² around the mountain, was among Malaysia’s first national parks in 1964 and became the country’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site in December 2000. Its slopes carry an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 plant species, 326 bird species and around 100 mammal species, including Rafflesia flowers and orangutans. Climbers can reach the top on foot without technical equipment, but must go with an accredited guide.
Across the state line in Sarawak, Gunung Mulu National Park, also listed by UNESCO in 2000, protects a karst landscape riddled with caves. Its Sarawak Chamber, found by three British cavers in January 1981, is the largest known cave chamber in the world by area: laser scanning in 2011 measured it at 164,459 m² of floor and about 9.58 million m³ of volume, second by volume only to the Miao Room in China. Sarawak also has Malaysia’s longest river, the Rajang, at about 565 km, and the 205 m Bakun Dam on its tributary, the Balui.
Danum Valley, Orangutans and the Palm Oil Frontier
In eastern Sabah, about 82 km from the town of Lahad Datu, the Danum Valley Conservation Area protects 438 km² of lowland dipterocarp forest that had no human settlement before it was set aside, so it was never logged or hunted. It shelters Bornean orangutans, gibbons, clouded leopards and more than 270 bird species, and its field centre, managed by the Sabah Foundation (Yayasan Sabah), is a research station for scientists and a nursery that raises dipterocarp seedlings by the hundred thousand.
Much of the surrounding land tells a different story. Malaysia is the world’s second-largest producer of palm oil after Indonesia, which alone accounted for about 57 percent of the 77.3 million tonnes produced worldwide in 2023–2024. Oil palms were brought to British Malaya in the 1870s as ornamental plants from West Africa, and the first commercial estate opened at Tennamaran in Selangor in 1917. Planting grew fast from the 1960s, when the government pushed palm oil to reduce dependence on rubber and tin, and the FELDA land-settlement schemes moved rural families onto new plantations. Clearing forest for oil palm has cut into orangutan habitat in both Malaysia and Indonesia; in 2010 the Malaysian government pledged to keep at least half of the country’s land under forest cover. Borneo’s wider forest story is told in our guide to the island of Borneo.
137 Languages from Kedah to Kuching
The national language is Malay, officially called Bahasa Malaysia, the mother tongue of the Malay majority. English is a compulsory school subject, the main teaching language of most private universities, and in Sabah and Sarawak it can still serve as an official working language. Malaysia has speakers of 137 living languages, 41 of them in Peninsular Malaysia; the rest are mostly in Borneo, where Iban, Dusunic and Kadazan languages are the largest native tongues. Government primary schools teach in Malay, Mandarin or Tamil, reflecting the main communities: in 2023, Malays and other Bumiputera made up 69.9 percent of the population, Chinese 22.8 percent and Indians 6.6 percent.
Islam is the official religion, while the constitution guarantees freedom of religion to non-Muslims. The legal system rests on English common law, a legacy of British rule, and laws are published in both Malay and English. For how those communities’ languages are actually spoken day to day, from Malaysian Chinese dialects to Tamil, see our post on the languages spoken in Malaysia.