Borneo
History
Database
A digital database of Borneo's past. Newspapers, records, and documents made searchable for the first time.
Kina Balu from Pinokok Valley — T. Picken, lith. Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1862 — Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Collaborations
A long-term research project using digital primary sources and AI to examine Borneo's history through local and international perspectives — connecting colonial records, indigenous narratives, and living cultural knowledge from Sabah, Sarawak, and Kalimantan.
Read more →A scanned page from 1885 — made searchable in seconds.
From the database
On 1 April 1885, the British North Borneo Herald published its seventh issue of the year. The Chartered Company had held its royal charter for just three years. The newspaper — typeset in London, shipped to Sandakan — was the territory's first regular publication. Reading it today, you find a world in the middle of being named: rivers acquiring English labels, people acquiring wage records, land acquiring titles.
The database puts 38 years of this process — 1885 to 1923 — within reach of anyone researching where those names and records came from. Alongside them, we collect the oral histories that the Herald never printed.
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