48 Fun Facts About Borneo

Borneo ranks where among the world's largest islands?

Third: only Greenland and New Guinea are bigger, because Australia, though ringed by sea, is counted as a continent rather than an island.

Which reality TV show filmed its first American season in 2000 on Pulau Tiga, off Borneo's north coast?

Survivor made the uninhabited jungle island famous, and the local parks authority now bills Pulau Tiga and its two neighbours as the 'Survivor islands'.

What trophies did Borneo's Iban warriors once carry home from raids?

Enemy heads: among the Iban a taken head was proof of a warrior's bravery, and until the early 20th century a man won his standing through his prowess as a headhunter.

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

The equator crosses the island at the city of Pontianak, where around midday on the March and September equinoxes the sun stands directly overhead and upright objects cast no shadow.

Which silent weapon do Penan hunters of Borneo's rainforest traditionally use, armed with poison made from tree sap?

Blowpipe: its darts are dipped in the latex of the upas tree, whose toxin stops the heart, and the Penan prize wild pigs above all other game.

What is Borneo's longest river?

The Kapuas runs 1,143 km to the sea near Pontianak, and boats can travel most of its length, which matters on an island where rivers are still the main roads inland.

Which kind of carnivorous plant grows so large on Borneo's Mount Kinabalu that drowned rats have been found inside?

Pitcher plant: the giant Nepenthes rajah mostly catches insects, yet tree shrews perch on its rim to lick nectar and leave droppings that feed the plant.

Which small nocturnal primate of Borneo has eyes each as big as its brain and can turn its head 180 degrees?

Tarsier: it is the only primate that eats nothing but live prey, leaping from tree trunks onto insects, lizards and even snakes in the dark.

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

Sundaland was dry land when ice-age seas stood lower, joining Borneo to Java, Sumatra and the mainland, and the channels of its drowned rivers can still be traced across the shallow seabed.

Which bear, the world's smallest, climbs trees in Borneo's rainforest to raid bees' nests?

Sun bear: it rips open nests and termite mounds with long curved claws and licks out the contents with a very long tongue, which is why Malays call it the honey bear.

Which tree family dominates Borneo's lowland rainforests?

Dipterocarps include the tallest tropical tree known, a yellow meranti in northern Borneo that was spotted from the air and then climbed with a tape measure in 2019 to confirm it tops 100 m.

Which naturalist wrote his first paper on the origin of species in Sarawak in 1855, before Darwin published?

Alfred Russel Wallace argued there that every species arises beside a closely allied one, and three years later his letter from Ternate spurred Darwin to go public.

The name 'orangutan' comes from Malay words usually translated as what?

Person of the forest: orang means person and hutan forest, and the phrase may first have described forest-dwelling people before Europeans applied it to the ape.

Bornean orangutans have lost much of their forest to plantations of which crop?

Oil palm and other clearing brought the steepest local declines, yet a 2018 study found far more orangutans vanished from forest that was still standing, which points to hunting.

Which primate, found only on Borneo, lives in mangroves and riverside forest and swims with partly webbed feet?

The proboscis monkey male's long drooping nose, which can hang down past his mouth, is thought to amplify his honking calls and help attract females.

According to a long-held tradition, who introduced elephants to Borneo?

The Sultan of Sulu is said to have freed a gift herd there, but a 2003 DNA study rejected the story, finding the elephants genetically distinct and probably isolated on Borneo since the Pleistocene.

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

Largest individual flower on Earth, yet the bloom is all anyone ever sees: the plant has no leaves, stem or roots and lives hidden inside a jungle vine as a parasite until it buds.

Iman, who died on Borneo in 2019, was Malaysia's last individual of which critically endangered animal?

Sumatran rhinoceros: every attempt to breed Iman with Malaysia's last male failed, and she outlived him by only months.

Borneo's Sarawak Chamber is the world's largest known cave chamber by what measure?

Area: a laser survey announced in 2014 showed China's Miao Room holds about a tenth more volume, leaving Sarawak Chamber only the floor-area record.

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

Gunung Mulu is named for a sandstone mountain, yet its fame lies in the limestone beside it, where cavers have mapped hundreds of kilometres of passages.

In which traditional building do whole Dayak villages on Borneo live under one roof, a family to each room?

Longhouse communities give each family a private room along one side and share the gallery on the other, so a single building can hold a few hundred people.

Which Javanese empire claimed Borneo as a vassal, naming it Nusa Tanjungnagara in a court poem of 1365?

Majapahit's court poet Mpu Prapanca listed the island among the lands his king claimed in the Nagarakretagama, though its rulers were probably vassals sending tribute, not conquered subjects.

Whose round-the-world expedition reached Borneo in 1521, months after its commander was killed in the Philippines?

Ferdinand Magellan never saw Borneo: he died on Mactan in April 1521, and his last two ships anchored off Brunei that July while still hunting for the Spice Islands.

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

James Brooke turned the reward into a dynasty: he and his heirs ruled Sarawak as the 'White Rajahs' for over a century, until the last of them ceded it to the Crown in 1946.

Which novelist set his 1895 debut, Almayer's Folly, on a Borneo river he had visited as a ship's officer?

Joseph Conrad called repeatedly at the river port of Berau as a steamer's mate, and modelled Almayer on a trader he met there named Olmeijer.

How many Allied prisoners of war survived the Sandakan death marches across Borneo in 1945?

Six men, all Australians, lived, and only because they escaped into the jungle; none of the prisoners still in Japanese hands at Sandakan or Ranau survived the war.

Which port city joined Malaysia alongside Sabah and Sarawak in 1963, only to leave two years later?

Singapore left in 1965 after two years of friction between its mostly Chinese state leaders and the mostly Malay federal government, and became an independent country.

Which Indonesian leader vowed to 'crush' the new Malaysia, backing raids across Borneo's jungle border from 1963?

Sukarno called Malaysia an imperialist plot and even quit the United Nations over it; the fighting faded once his army sidelined him, and a 1966 peace recognised the new country.

What lets Borneo's paradise tree snake, a so-called flying snake, glide from tree to tree?

A flattened body is the trick: it flares its ribs to double its width, cups its belly and swims through the air, the only limbless vertebrate known to glide.

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

The typhoon belt of East Asia passes just to the north, so the storms that batter the Philippines rarely reach Sabah; an American writer made the nickname the title of her 1939 memoir.

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

The hornbill gives Sarawak its nickname, Land of the Hornbills; a nesting female is walled into a tree hollow with mud, and her mate passes food to her through a narrow slit.

Which scaly, ant-eating mammal of Borneo's forests rolls into an armoured ball when threatened?

Pangolin comes from a Malay word meaning 'roller'; its scales are keratin, like fingernails, yet demand for them has made it the world's most trafficked wild mammal.

Kampong Ayer, a centuries-old district of Brunei's capital, houses thousands of people in homes built on what?

Stilts hold its homes, schools and mosques above the Brunei River, wooden walkways link the neighbourhoods, and water taxis do the work of buses.

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

Gastronomy won Kuching the title in 2021, for a food culture that marries indigenous forest ingredients with two centuries of immigrant cooking.

Sipadan, a famed dive island off Borneo, is a cap of living coral growing on top of what?

An extinct volcano rises about 600 metres from the seabed beneath the coral, which makes Sipadan Malaysia's only oceanic island instead of part of the continental shelf.

Which deposit beneath Borneo's swamp forests, once drained, fuels the fires that blanket Southeast Asia in smoke haze?

Peat is a deep layer of half-rotted plants, so once drained it burns like fuel, smouldering underground for months and resurfacing far from where the fire began.

Which spiky fruit, native to Borneo and nearby lands, smells so strong that some hotels and public transport ban it?

Durian takes its name from the Malay word for thorn; the custard-like flesh is mild and sweet, but the smell, likened to Limburger cheese, can linger for days.

Which conservation agreement did Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia sign in 2007 to protect Borneo's forests?

The Heart of Borneo is a rainforest that straddles all three countries' borders, so no one government could protect it alone.

Which sea lies to the north and northwest of Borneo?

The South China Sea washes that whole coast, and the scattered reefs offshore are claimed, wholly or in part, by Malaysia and at least four other governments.

At Gomantong Caves in Sabah, climbers on rattan ladders harvest what prized ingredient of a Chinese soup?

Swiftlet nests are built from the birds' own hardened saliva high on the cave roof, and licensed climbers still take them by hand twice a year for bird's nest soup.

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

Labuan was handed over by Brunei in 1846 as a base against pirates, and since 1990 it has traded on tax breaks instead, as Malaysia's offshore financial centre.

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

Britain and the Netherlands shared the island out in the 19th century: the British-protected north became Malaysia and Brunei, the Dutch south became Indonesian Kalimantan, and the old line is still the border.

Which tree-climbing cat of Borneo has the longest canine teeth for its size of any living cat?

Clouded leopard populations on Borneo and Sumatra hid a surprise: only this century did geneticists find they were a separate species, split from their mainland cousins for roughly a million years.

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

The oldest known figurative painting at the time, it shows a wild-cattle-like animal at least 40,000 years old; even older cave art has since been dated on neighbouring Sulawesi.

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

Madagascar's language is the giveaway: the closest relative of Malagasy is Ma'anyan, still spoken in southern Borneo, a whole ocean away.

Stone pillars carved at Kutai in eastern Borneo around AD 400 record a king's gifts to priests of which religion?

Hinduism had reached Borneo by then: the pillars, carved in Sanskrit, record King Mulavarman's gifts to Brahmin priests, about a thousand years before Islam took hold on the island.

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

The Cobbold Commission, led by a former Bank of England governor, reported in 1962 that about one in three backed joining outright, one in three wanted safeguards first, and the rest preferred independence or British rule.

Miri, a city on Sarawak's coast, owes its existence to a strike of what in the 1910s?

Oil wells came first and the town grew up around them; Miri is still nicknamed 'Oil Town', though most production long ago moved offshore.