Malaysia Map

Two halves across the South China Sea

Malaysia is split in two by several hundred kilometers of the South China Sea. Peninsular Malaysia, at the southern end of the Malay Peninsula, borders Thailand to the north and faces Singapore across the narrow Strait of Johor. East Malaysia, made up of Sabah and Sarawak, covers the northern part of Borneo, which it shares with Indonesia's Kalimantan and with Brunei, an enclave on the Sarawak coast. The two halves together cover 330,803 square kilometers, but people are concentrated on the peninsula: about four in five of Malaysia's roughly 36 million inhabitants (UN World Population Prospects, 2025 estimate) live there. The Strait of Malacca, along the peninsula's west coast, is one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, carrying much of the oil and container traffic between the Indian Ocean and East Asia.

Mountains, rivers and rainforest

The Titiwangsa Range forms the spine of the peninsula, with the hill stations of Cameron Highlands and Genting Highlands on its flanks; the peninsula's highest peak, Gunung Tahan (2,187 meters), rises inside Taman Negara national park. Borneo is higher and wilder. Mount Kinabalu in Sabah, at 4,095 meters, is the highest mountain in Malaysia and on Borneo, and Kinabalu Park is a World Heritage site for its extraordinary plant diversity. Sarawak is a land of rivers: the Rajang, about 560 kilometers long, is Malaysia's longest, and the limestone caves of Gunung Mulu National Park include the Sarawak Chamber, one of the largest known cave chambers in the world. Lowland rainforest still covers large parts of the Bornean interior, where Sabah and Sarawak have Malaysia's wild orangutans, but oil palm plantations now occupy much former forest land on both sides of the sea.

Which coast, which season

The climate is equatorial, hot and humid all year, and seasons are defined by rain rather than temperature. The northeast monsoon, roughly November to March, brings the heaviest rain and frequent floods to the peninsula's east coast (Kelantan, Terengganu and Pahang) and to Sabah and Sarawak; many resorts on the Perhentian and Redang islands close during these months. The west coast is wettest in the inter-monsoon periods around April-May and October-November. In practice, Langkawi and Penang are at their best from December to April, and the east-coast islands from about March to October. Malaysia lies south of the main typhoon belt, although Sabah occasionally feels the edge of passing storms.

States and federal territories

Malaysia is a federation of 13 states and three federal territories: Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya and the island of Labuan off Sabah. Nine of the peninsular states have hereditary Malay rulers, and every five years their Conference of Rulers elects one of them as Yang di-Pertuan Agong, the federal king; Sultan Ibrahim of Johor has held the post since January 2024. The other four states (Penang, Malacca, Sabah and Sarawak) have appointed governors. Sabah and Sarawak keep extra autonomy, including their own immigration controls, under the terms on which they joined the federation. Malay is the national language and Islam the religion of the federation, while Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism are widely practised; among citizens, roughly 70% are Bumiputera (Malays and indigenous peoples), about 22% Chinese and around 7% Indian.

Major cities

Kuala Lumpur, the capital and largest city, grew from a 19th-century tin-mining settlement where the Klang and Gombak rivers meet. Its skyline is marked by the Petronas Twin Towers (452 meters, the world's tallest buildings from 1998 to 2004) and now by Merdeka 118, completed in 2023 and second in height only to Dubai's Burj Khalifa. Federal ministries moved to the planned city of Putrajaya, south of Kuala Lumpur, from 1999, but Kuala Lumpur remains the official capital and the seat of parliament. George Town on Penang island and Malacca share a World Heritage listing for their colonial-era streets, shophouses and temples. Johor Bahru, joined to Singapore by the Causeway and the Second Link, anchors the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone agreed in 2025. Ipoh, in the Kinta Valley, is an old tin-mining town ringed by limestone hills, while Kuching and Kota Kinabalu, the capitals of Sarawak and Sabah, are the main gateways to Borneo's national parks.

From Malacca to Malaysia

The Malacca Sultanate, founded around 1400, controlled the strait's trade until the Portuguese captured the port in 1511; the Dutch took it in 1641, and the British, who had founded Penang and Singapore, took over in the early 19th century. The Federation of Malaya became independent on 31 August 1957. Malaysia itself was formed on 16 September 1963, when Malaya joined with Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore; Singapore left in 1965. Indonesia opposed the new federation in an armed confrontation that lasted until 1966, and the Philippines maintains a claim to eastern Sabah, which Malaysia rejects. Malaysia was a founding member of ASEAN in 1967 and claims part of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, where claims overlap with those of China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Taiwan. Its economy rests on electronics and semiconductors (Penang is a major chip-packaging hub), oil and gas, and palm oil, of which Malaysia is the world's second-largest producer after Indonesia, with about a quarter of global output.