Earth’s third-largest island is split by three flags and fire
Borneo spans about 748,168 square kilometres at Maritime Southeast Asia’s centre, with some 23 million residents in 2020 censuses—third among world islands. Once joined to Asia in Sundaland until post-glacial seas rose, it now hosts ancient rainforests, Dayak cultures, and a political split among Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei.
Borneo sits at the geographic centre of maritime Southeast Asia, one of the Greater Sunda Islands with Java to its south, Sumatra to its west and Sulawesi to its east, and the equator slices it roughly in half. Its rocks began forming in the Mesozoic, and it belonged to Sundaland, joined to mainland Asia, until rising seas at the close of the last glacial period cut it off. Seven distinct ecoregions include huge tracts of some of the oldest tropical rainforest on earth, and the island teems with species found nowhere else, among them the proboscis monkey.
Humans have lived here for tens of thousands of years, and hundreds of Indigenous communities, cultures and languages exist, many traditionally lumped together as Dayak. By the first millennium CE coastal trading settlements were linked into regional sea networks. Powers rose along the shores: Javanese Majapahit; the Sultanate of Brunei, which at its fifteenth-century peak held sway over much of the coast and parts of the southern Philippines; and the Sulu Sultanate in the north-east. The interior stayed a patchwork of local authorities rather than any single state. Britain, the Netherlands and Japan later colonised parts of it.
Since independence three countries share it. Indonesia holds about 73 percent, split into the five provinces of Kalimantan, a name Indonesians also use for the whole island. Malaysia's Sabah and Sarawak make up about 26 percent, and Brunei occupies a sliver on the north-west coast, the only sovereign state lying wholly on Borneo. Most people live in coastal cities, the economy rests on oil and gas, farming, timber and tourism, and Indonesia plans to move its capital here, to Nusantara. A century of logging and conversion to farmland has stripped large areas of forest.
The island's name grew out of Brunei. European travellers wrote it as Bornei, Burnei or Burneo, and the label spread to the whole island. It may trace to the Sanskrit váruṇa, water, or the rain and ocean god Varuna. Chinese sources used Bóní for southern trading colonies in the ninth century and Bo-ni for Borneo in 977.
Source: Borneo
