50 Fun Facts About Borneo

Borneo ranks where among the world's largest islands?

At 748,168 km2 it trails only Greenland and New Guinea, and is home to about 23 million people.

How many sovereign states share the island of Borneo?

Indonesia holds about 73%, Malaysia's Sabah and Sarawak about 26%, and Brunei roughly 1%.

What is the Indonesian name for Borneo and for its part of the island?

Indonesian Kalimantan is split into five provinces: West, Central, South, East and North.

Which line of latitude crosses Borneo, dividing it roughly in half?

The island sits at the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia, north of Java and east of Sumatra.

Roughly what share of Borneo is Indonesian territory?

Sabah and Sarawak make up about 26%, and Brunei about 1%; Malaysia's Labuan sits on an islet just offshore.

What is Borneo's longest river?

It runs 1,143 km through West Kalimantan; the Mahakam, Barito, Rajang and Kinabatangan are the other giants.

How tall is Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak in Malaysia and Maritime Southeast Asia?

A 1997 satellite survey shaved six metres off the old figure; the summit is called Low's Peak.

In which Malaysian state does Mount Kinabalu stand?

It sits in Ranau district and is protected as Kinabalu Park, a World Heritage Site.

Borneo was once joined to mainland Asia as part of which drowned region?

Rising seas at the end of the last ice age cut it off; deeper water toward Sulawesi forms Wallace's Line between Asian and Australian wildlife.

How old is the Borneo rainforest estimated to be?

That makes it one of the oldest on Earth, dominated by dipterocarp trees.

Which tree family dominates Borneo's lowland rainforests?

267 of Borneo's roughly 3,000 tree species are dipterocarps, prized by the timber trade.

How many species of flowering plants does Borneo have?

Add 221 land mammals, 420 resident birds and about 440 freshwater fish, roughly as many as Sumatra and Java combined.

The Bornean orangutan belongs to the only genus of great apes native to which continent?

It is the largest of the three Pongo species, with arms up to 1.5 metres long and males that grow cheek flanges.

By how many did Bornean orangutan numbers fall between 1999 and 2015, per a 2018 study?

The rainforest is one of the endangered ape's last natural habitats.

Which large-nosed primate is endemic to Borneo's mangroves and riversides?

Nasalis larvatus lives in all three of the island's countries and shares its forests with orangutans and silvery lutungs.

According to tradition, who introduced elephants to Borneo in the 18th century?

Captive elephants were released into the jungle; the 'pygmy' label is misleading, as Sabah's adults match Peninsular Malaysian elephants in height.

Rafflesia arnoldii, native to Borneo and Sumatra, holds which record?

Its blooms reach a metre across and 11 kg, and smell of rotting flesh, hence the name corpse flower.

Which endangered fish is known only from the Kinabatangan in Sabah?

The WWF said 123 new species were found on the island in the three years after the 2007 Heart of Borneo agreement.

Which Sarawak cave is home to over three million bats and guano more than 100 metres deep?

Nearby Clearwater Cave has one of the world's longest underground rivers, and Sabah's Gomantong is dubbed the Cockroach Cave.

The Sarawak Chamber, found in 1981, is the world's largest cave chamber by what measure?

Discovered by three British cavers in 1981, it is 600 m long and 415 m wide; only China's Miao Room beats it by volume.

Which Sarawak national park contains the Sarawak Chamber and Clearwater Cave?

A 15-month Royal Geographical Society expedition in 1978 was the largest ever sent from Britain and surveyed 50 km of passages.

For roughly how long has Borneo been inhabited by humans, according to archaeological evidence?

Its hundreds of indigenous groups are loosely grouped as Dayak.

Which Javanese empire absorbed Borneo, and called it Nusa Tanjungnagara in a 1365 manuscript?

The court poet Mpu Prapanca named it in the Nagarakretagama as the island of the Tanjungpura Kingdom.

At its 14th-century peak, which sultanate governed most of Borneo's coast?

Under Sultan Bolkiah (1485–1528) it claimed most of Borneo plus the Sulu archipelago; the interior stayed beyond anyone's control.

Which British adventurer was made Rajah of Sarawak in 1841 for helping quell a rebellion?

He had bought the schooner Royalist with a £30,000 inheritance; his family of White Rajahs ruled until 1946.

What was the name of the short-lived American colony founded near Kimanis in northwestern Borneo?

The American Trading Company of Borneo set it up on land bought from Brunei, but it failed for lack of funds.

How many of the roughly 2,500 prisoners survived the Sandakan Death March under Japanese occupation?

Of 17,488 Javanese labourers the Japanese brought in, only about 1,500 survived, mainly starvation.

On what date did northern Borneo join the new federation under the Malaysia Agreement?

The Cobbold Commission had found the local population strongly in favour, despite Indonesian and Philippine opposition.

When did the Dutch begin posting residents to Banjarmasin, Pontianak and Sambas in southern Borneo?

Their zone became Dutch Borneo, the ancestor of today's Kalimantan; the British took the north.

Which country began building a new capital, Nusantara, on Borneo in 2022?

It occupies land in East Kalimantan's Penajam North Paser and Kutai Kartanegara regencies.

How many provinces make up the Indonesian portion of the island?

It was one province from 1945 to 1956, then split into three, four in 1957, and five with North Kalimantan.

Sabah is nicknamed the 'Land Below the Wind' because it lies below what?

It shares maritime borders with Vietnam and the Philippines and land borders with Sarawak and North Kalimantan.

Sarawak's nickname honours which bird, sacred to the Dayak?

Bumi Kenyalang, Land of the Hornbills; a hornbill flying over houses is said to bring the community luck.

The sultanate on Borneo's north coast is split into two parts by which Sarawak district?

Apart from its South China Sea coastline the sultanate is entirely surrounded by Sarawak.

In which year did the northern sultanate become a British protectorate?

A British resident followed in 1906, after the sultanate had ceded Kuching to Brooke and Sabah to the North Borneo Chartered Company.

Kuching, capital of Sarawak, is a UNESCO Creative City in which field?

Founded in 1827 under Brunei, it became Brooke's capital in 1841 and is the main gateway to Sarawak.

Sipadan, off Sabah's east coast, is Malaysia's only what?

It rises 600 metres from the Celebes Sea floor on an extinct volcanic cone and was made a bird sanctuary in 1933.

What fraction of the world's annual tropical timber comes from Borneo?

Heavy logging and palm-oil plantations have slashed the island's rainforest cover over the past century.

John Crawfurd's 1865 dictionary traced the Malay name Kalamantan to a type of what?

He said the 'Isle of Mangoes' name was little used; a mango called klemantan still grows in West Kalimantan.

Which international agreement, signed in 2007, aims to conserve the island's central forests?

The WWF reported 123 newly discovered species in the three years after it was signed.

Which sea lies to the north and northwest of Borneo?

The Sulu Sea is to the northeast, the Celebes Sea and Makassar Strait to the east and the Java Sea to the south.

Which Sabah cave system is nicknamed the 'Cockroach Cave'?

Millions of cockroaches live among the guano; the caves are also famous for edible swiftlet nests.

Which Malaysian federal territory sits on a small island just off Borneo's coast?

It lies off Sabah's west coast and is administered directly from Kuala Lumpur.

Which two colonial powers divided Borneo, setting the borders its three modern states follow?

Japan occupied the whole island during World War II; the Portuguese had traded with Brunei from 1530 but never tried to conquer it.

Roughly what was Borneo's population according to the 2020 national censuses?

That is only about 31 people per square kilometre, with most living in coastal cities and the interior sparsely settled.

What did scientists announce in 2018 they had found at Lubang Jeriji Saléh in Borneo?

The painting of an unknown animal is at least 40,000 and perhaps 52,000 years old.

Which island nation may have been first settled from southern Borneo, per genetic evidence?

House construction styles also support the theory of an Austronesian voyage across the Indian Ocean.

Kutai's stone pillars, early evidence of Hindu influence in Southeast Asia, use which script?

They stand along the Mahakam River in East Kalimantan and date to the second half of the 4th century.

Which body was set up to gauge whether northern Borneo's people wanted to join Malaysia?

It found the population strongly in favour, with stipulations, despite opposition from Indonesia and the Philippines.

In 1897 Mark Abrahams struck oil in the delta of which river, opening the Sanga Sanga field?

Marcus Samuel had won the Kutei concession in 1895; a refinery followed at Balikpapan and more fields on Tarakan and Bunyu.