In January 2026, following nearly a year of meticulous restoration works, a ceremony was held at Kuala Lumpur’s Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad to commemorate its reopening as a national exhibition and cultural centre. Few buildings hold more significance for Malaysia. Built by the British colonial administration between 1894 and 1897 to serve as the New Government Offices, the Bangunan went on to house various departments of the Malaysian state, including the federal judiciary. On one side, it borders the juncture of the Klang and Gombak rivers that supposedly gave Kuala Lumpur (‘muddy confluence’) its name. On the other, it overlooks Dataran Merdeka, the site of the country’s independence celebrations in 1957. The Malaysian sovereign wealth fund – the primary backer of the restoration project – has branded the building ‘The Soul of Kuala Lumpur.’
The reopening of the Bangunan provides a salient moment to consider how Malaysia engages with the architecture of its colonial past to construct modern symbols of national identity. In 2024, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim emphasised that ‘concepts of Malay heritage’ should be apparent in the restoration of the building, despite its cross-cultural origins. His statement echoed the assertions of scholars, including Mohammad Tajuddin Rasdi, Ziauddin Sardar, and Sarah Moser, that Malaysia’s state-led architecture is designed to create a hegemonic identity consolidated around the country’s Muslim Malay majority. State-administered accounts of the Bangunan offer limited details of its colonial history, often overlooking the broader social environment of nineteenth-century Kuala Lumpur that underpinned its conception. Examining the building within this wider context reveals the colonial hierarchies and prejudices of its architecture, as well as the vital contributions of ethnic-minority labourers to its construction – pasts that challenge prevailing state narratives, and which have been omitted to project an Islamicised, Malay-centric version of national heritage.
Colonial officials often utilised grand civic buildings to underline their rule. British imperialists were drawn to Kuala Lumpur for the lucrative tin deposits found in the surrounding Selangor Sultanate, and envisioned the Bangunan as an impressive administrative headquarters to signify the city’s growing importance as an economic hub. Scale and style helped to declare this ethos. The breadth of the Bangunan stood out against the open expanse of the adjacent padang (field) of the Selangor Club, and its 135-foot clock tower loomed high above the burgeoning city. Charles Edwin Spooner, a British engineer, was transferred from Ceylon to oversee the project and steered the design of the new offices towards the Indo-Saracenic style common to imperial buildings in South Asia.
As the architectural historian Preeti Chopra has outlined, this style – with hybrid features drawn from European and Islamic tradition – was originally intended to pacify Indian anti-imperialism by appropriating an aesthetic language familiar to the region, positioning the British as ‘indigenous, rather than foreign’ successors to the Mughal Empire. In Kuala Lumpur, the Indo-Saracenic style took on a similarly unifying role. The implementation of Islamic architectural motifs, argues Thomas Metcalf, was an attempt by the British administration to appeal to local sultans, presenting themselves as ‘an integral part of an enduring Muslim Malay land’ and inviting ethnic Malays to be ‘participants in this [imperial] vision.’
This, however, was a token display of inclusivity in a colony where labour and production were the primary criteria through which communities were valued. Architecture, in turn, was made to mirror these realities. An October 1894 article in the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser relates the purported efficiency of the Bangunan:
‘The result will be that all departments of Government will be in immediate touch, and there will be a great saving of time in communicating one with the other. Instead of, as now, having to wander over half the town to get from one official to another, the majority will be located under one roof in the Public Offices, certainly within a few hundred feet of each other.’
The design choice to include a monumental clock tower was a further reflection of the importance that time and the capitalist economy held for British colonialists. It supplemented the notorious timekeeping habit of the colonial police, who fired a signal gun at noon and five p.m. to announce the passing of the workday.
These practices were likely informed by widely held stereotypes that Malays were naturally idle. Frank Swettenham, who served in Malaya for several decades and was Governor of the Straits Settlements from 1901-1904, wrote that the average Malay was ‘lazy to a degree, is without method or order of any kind, knows no regularity even in the hours of his meals, and considers time as of no importance.’ Public discussions of architecture often articulated this bigoted predisposition. In the city of Taiping, for example, the colonial press described the clock of a new police station as ‘certainly handsome, but also useless, as it is situated in a locality chiefly used by natives only, who, as a rule, care very little about the time.’
In Kuala Lumpur, the Bangunan and its clock tower embodied the British desire to reform imperial subjects into diligent members of contemporary society. This supposedly modernising effect offered a new point of reference for colonial preconceptions. At the opening of the Bangunan in 1897, the editor of the Selangor Journal wrote that it was now ‘difficult to believe that even so near to us as in Singapore there are some who still regard Kuala Lumpur as a place in the jungle’ – a phrase that alluded to the primitive depictions of the Malay peninsula popularised by European travelogues like Isabella Bird’s The Golden Chersonese.
Malays were not the only targets of colonial prejudice. As processes of industry rapidly reconfigured the city, British bureaucrats relied on local manufacturing for their building projects. In the neighbouring Brickfields district, where Chinese labourers had been fabricating building components for over a decade, the Public Works Department set up a factory to supply bricks for construction. British anecdotes of these Chinese workers, though often complementary on the surface, are tinged with stereotypes. J.M. Gullick, a former colonial officer, recorded the recollections of a local school headmistress, Edith Stratton Brown, in his 1992 essay on the Bangunan:
‘As the building grew higher the Chinese workmen threw up the 4 million bricks, two at a time, without – it is said – dropping one.’
Similarly, in an article detailing a ceremony held in 1894 to commemorate the laying of the clock tower foundations:
‘It is perhaps characteristic of the State that although the Governor was laying the foundation stone, the Chinese masons kept on steadily at their own work, a few yards off, although well past five o’clock. Whatever may be their pleasures in Selangor – work goes on.’
Where the Malays were seen as passive and apathetic, the Chinese were viewed, in the words of Scottish geographer John Thomson, as ‘dishonest, cunning, and treacherous’ but ‘when properly restrained, the most useful and most indispensable members of society.’
Syed Alatas’ seminal study, The Myth of the Lazy Native, ascribes these biases to the fact that colonialists were exposed to certain ethnic groups through their prescribed and frequently coerced role in empire-building. The Chinese in Malaya were ‘visible’ because their work mostly occurred at tin mines or urban areas, while Malay communities, left to oversee agricultural lands, were more peripheral to colonial capitalism. As the urban fabric of Kuala Lumpur was remade in the image and inclinations of empire, civic architecture reflected these ingrained forms of discrimination.
This context would seem to subvert the Bangunan’s contemporary status as a ‘foundation of national identity’. The Bangunan was ultimately a natural choice for appropriation within the state’s Muslim-Malay nationalism, however, because the Islamic features of the Indo-Saracenic style could be retraced to the supposed agency of the Malay sultans. As the building’s new promotional website explains, ‘its architectural language […] was deliberately conceived to resonate with the Muslim Ruler of Selangor whilst projecting a sense of authority and permanence.’ These claims contribute to the perpetuation of the Bangunan as a nationalist symbol within the narrative boundaries of the state, augmenting entrenched processes of monumentalisation. Various forms of local and international dissemination, from its typical role as the backdrop for National Day parades to news broadcasts, banknotes, stamps, passport illustrations, and tourism advertisements, prove the state’s longstanding eagerness to associate the Bangunan with Malaysian nationhood. No reference is made to the contributions of the Chinese labourers – or, in fact, to any labourers at all.
Today, the government’s efforts appear to have been successful. Where many have grown accustomed to witnessing the demolition of older buildings for high-rise towers and shopping centres, the restoration has reinvigorated the historic core of Kuala Lumpur. Crowds gather in former office spaces and courtrooms to meander through art exhibitions or to sip on local coffee, whilst visitors on the veranda take in a view of Dataran Merdeka. As part of the ‘Warisan KL’ initiative, the revival of the Bangunan is to be followed by that of other colonial-era sites across the city – a sign that the flagship architectural programmes of Prime Minister Anwar’s administration are shifting away from the grandiose new-build urban developments of previous regimes towards more localised, heritage-focused revitalisation projects.
In recent years, however, the aspirations of Malaysian authorities have been increasingly challenged. The popularity of independent restoration projects like RexKL and the Zhongshan Building indicates a growing demand for more nuanced methods of engagement with national heritage and culture. The reopening of the Bangunan, despite its patronage, raises the possibility of similarly critical encounters with the architecture intended to emblematise the country. In time, this might allow narratives to gradually shift away from those embedded by the state, and towards more equitable, inclusive confrontations with the entangled pasts of the Malaysian nation.