Malaysia

Malaysia is a country in two parts.

One part is on a long piece of land. The other part is on a big island called Borneo. The sea lies between them. The capital city is Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia is in Southeast Asia, just north of the Equator, and it is split into two parts. Peninsular Malaysia is on the Malay Peninsula, a long, narrow arm of land, and East Malaysia is on the island of Borneo. About 640 kilometers of the South China Sea lie between them.

East Malaysia is the bigger part, about 60 percent of the land, but most people live on the peninsula. The capital, Kuala Lumpur, is on the peninsula's west side. About 34.4 million people lived in Malaysia in 2026, and the national language is Malay, called Bahasa Malaysia.

Malaysia lies just north of the Equator and consists of two noncontiguous regions: Peninsular (West) Malaysia, on the southern part of the Malay Peninsula, and East Malaysia, the states of Sarawak and Sabah, which occupy roughly the northern fourth of Borneo. The peninsula makes up about 40 percent of the total area of about 330,800 square kilometers and East Malaysia about 60 percent, yet the vast majority of people live on the peninsula.

Malaysia was established on September 16, 1963, from Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia), Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah; Singapore left the federation in August 1965. The Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) estimates the population at 34.4 million in 2026, 31.0 million of them citizens. Kuala Lumpur is the capital, and Putrajaya, about 25 km to the south, is the administrative center.

Kuala Lumpur is the biggest city in Malaysia.

Its name means 'muddy estuary'. It grew where two rivers meet. It has two giant, shiny towers joined by a bridge in the sky. George Town and Melaka are old port towns by the sea.

Kuala Lumpur began in 1857, when Chinese tin miners started a settlement there. The city stands where two rivers meet, and its name means 'muddy estuary' in Malay. Today it is the country's largest city, with skyscrapers, mosques and old shop-houses. The Petronas Twin Towers, finished in 1998, are 452 meters tall and joined by a two-story skybridge.

Melaka and George Town grew up over 500 years of trade between East and West. Their old centers, full of shop-houses, places of worship of many faiths and buildings from Malay, Portuguese, Dutch and British times, are a World Heritage Site.

Kuala Lumpur, at the confluence of the Kelang and Gombak rivers, dates to 1857, when 87 Chinese tin miners founded a settlement at what is now the suburb of Ampang. It became capital of the Federated Malay States in 1895, of the independent Federation of Malaya in 1957 and of Malaysia in 1963. Its Golden Triangle holds the 118-story Merdeka 118 and the 88-story Petronas Twin Towers, designed by Cesar Pelli for the national petroleum company and completed in 1998: each eight-lobed tower rises to 452 m, including a 73.6 m pinnacle and spire, and a two-story skybridge links them between the 41st and 42nd stories.

UNESCO inscribed Melaka and George Town, Historic Cities of the Straits of Malacca, in 2008. Melaka shows the 15th-century Malay sultanate and the Portuguese and Dutch periods from the early 16th century; George Town represents the British era from the end of the 18th century, with an exceptional range of shop-houses and townhouses.

Malaysia is warm and rainy all year.

Thick green rainforest covers much of the land. Mount Kinabalu is the tallest mountain. Under the ground there are giant caves. Millions of bats live in one of them.

Down the middle of the peninsula run mountain ranges, with flatter land along the coasts. In Sabah, on Borneo, Mount Kinabalu rises 4,095 meters, the highest peak in Malaysia. In Sarawak, Gunung Mulu National Park has some of the biggest caves on Earth: the Sarawak Chamber is 600 meters long, 415 meters wide and 80 meters high.

Malaysia is hot and humid all year, with heavy rain. Its year is shaped by two monsoons, seasonal winds from the northeast (about November to March) and from the southwest (about May to September). Thick evergreen rainforest still covers more than two-fifths of the peninsula and about two-thirds of Sarawak and Sabah.

Peninsular Malaysia has a mountainous core of roughly parallel north-south ranges; the Main Range is about 480 km long, with peaks above 2,100 m, and limestone karst hills with caves mark the center and north. East Malaysia has a coastal plain, a hill-and-valley belt and a mountainous backbone along the border with Kalimantan, above which Mount Kinabalu reaches 4,095 m, the highest peak in Malaysia. UNESCO describes Kinabalu as a granite intrusion formed 15 million years ago and pushed upward one million years ago. At Gunung Mulu, at least 295 km of explored caves include the Sarawak Chamber (600 × 415 × 80 m), the largest known cave chamber in the world.

The climate is equatorial: lowland temperatures on the peninsula average about 27 °C, and mean annual rainfall there is about 2,540 mm, from about 1,650 mm at Kuala Kelawang to some 5,000 mm at Maxwell's Hill. The northeast monsoon runs from November or December to March and the southwest monsoon from May or June to September or early October. Neither part of Malaysia lies in the typhoon belt. The longest rivers are the Pahang (434 km) on the peninsula and the Rajang (about 563 km) in Sarawak.