Borneo Trivia
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48 free Borneo trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Borneo trivia quiz covers the third-largest island on Earth, split three ways between Indonesia's Kalimantan, Malaysia's Sabah and Sarawak, and the tiny sultanate of Brunei. It starts with the map: the equator that cuts the island in half, the Kapuas and other great rivers, Mount Kinabalu, Wallace's Line and the drowned continent of Sundaland. Then it dives into a 140-million-year-old rainforest of dipterocarps, orangutans, proboscis monkeys, pygmy elephants, hornbills, the Borneo river shark and the giant, reeking Rafflesia flower. History follows: 65,000 years of human habitation, the Majapahit and Brunei empires, the White Rajahs of Sarawak, the North Borneo Company, the Sandakan Death March, the 1963 Malaysia Agreement and Indonesia's decision to build its new capital, Nusantara, in East Kalimantan. There are also questions on Mulu's Sarawak Chamber and Deer Cave, Sipadan's reefs, Kuching, and the palm oil and timber trades reshaping the island. Easy questions suit students; the hard ones will test seasoned travellers and naturalists. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on Borneo and its regions, wildlife and landmarks, and each explanation adds one further fact.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Borneo ranks where among the world's largest islands?
Third
Third: only Greenland and New Guinea are bigger, because Australia, though ringed by sea, is counted as a continent rather than an island.
Q 02Which reality TV show filmed its first American season in 2000 on Pulau Tiga, off Borneo's north coast?
Survivor
Survivor made the uninhabited jungle island famous, and the local parks authority now bills Pulau Tiga and its two neighbours as the 'Survivor islands'.
Q 03What trophies did Borneo's Iban warriors once carry home from raids?
Enemy heads
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.
Q 04Which line of latitude crosses Borneo, dividing it roughly in half?
The equator
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.
Q 05Which silent weapon do Penan hunters of Borneo's rainforest traditionally use, armed with poison made from tree sap?
Blowpipe
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.
Q 06What is Borneo's longest river?
The Kapuas
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.
Q 07Which kind of carnivorous plant grows so large on Borneo's Mount Kinabalu that drowned rats have been found inside?
Pitcher plant
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.
Q 08Which small nocturnal primate of Borneo has eyes each as big as its brain and can turn its head 180 degrees?
Tarsier
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.
Q 09Borneo was once joined to mainland Asia as part of which drowned region?
Sundaland
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.
Q 10Which bear, the world's smallest, climbs trees in Borneo's rainforest to raid bees' nests?
Sun bear
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.
Q 11Which tree family dominates Borneo's lowland rainforests?
Dipterocarps
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.
Q 12Which naturalist wrote his first paper on the origin of species in Sarawak in 1855, before Darwin published?
Alfred Russel Wallace
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.
Q 13The name 'orangutan' comes from Malay words usually translated as what?
Person of the forest
Q 21In which traditional building do whole Dayak villages on Borneo live under one roof, a family to each room?
Longhouse
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.
Q 22Which Javanese empire claimed Borneo as a vassal, naming it Nusa Tanjungnagara in a court poem of 1365?
Majapahit
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.
Q 23Whose round-the-world expedition reached Borneo in 1521, months after its commander was killed in the Philippines?
Ferdinand Magellan
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.
Q 14Bornean orangutans have lost much of their forest to plantations of which crop?
Oil palm
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.
Q 15Which primate, found only on Borneo, lives in mangroves and riverside forest and swims with partly webbed feet?
The proboscis monkey
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.
Q 16According to a long-held tradition, who introduced elephants to Borneo?
The Sultan of Sulu
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.
Q 17Rafflesia arnoldii, native to Borneo and Sumatra, holds which record?
Largest individual flower on Earth
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.
Q 18Iman, who died on Borneo in 2019, was Malaysia's last individual of which critically endangered animal?
Sumatran rhinoceros
Sumatran rhinoceros: every attempt to breed Iman with Malaysia's last male failed, and she outlived him by only months.
Q 19Borneo's Sarawak Chamber is the world's largest known cave chamber by what measure?
Area
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.
Q 20Which Sarawak national park contains the Sarawak Chamber and Clearwater Cave?
Gunung Mulu
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.
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.
Q 24Which British adventurer was made Rajah of Sarawak in 1841 for helping quell a rebellion?
James Brooke
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.
Q 25Which novelist set his 1895 debut, Almayer's Folly, on a Borneo river he had visited as a ship's officer?
Joseph Conrad
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.
Q 26How many Allied prisoners of war survived the Sandakan death marches across Borneo in 1945?
Six
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.
Q 27Which port city joined Malaysia alongside Sabah and Sarawak in 1963, only to leave two years later?
Singapore
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.
Q 28Which Indonesian leader vowed to 'crush' the new Malaysia, backing raids across Borneo's jungle border from 1963?
Sukarno
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.
Q 29What lets Borneo's paradise tree snake, a so-called flying snake, glide from tree to tree?
A flattened body
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.
Q 30Sabah is nicknamed the 'Land Below the Wind' because it lies below what?
The typhoon belt of East Asia
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.