Melaka Sultanate Palace Museum

The palace of the Malacca sultans was destroyed long ago, and what stands at the foot of St Paul's Hill is a reconstruction completed in 1986 - built without nails, in carved hardwood, from the account of Sultan Mansur Shah's istana given in the Sejarah Melayu, the Malay Annals, which describes a seven-roofed timber building with copper and zinc shingles. That makes it an interpretation rather than a restoration, and the museum inside is explicit about it. The contents cover the sultanate at its height in the fifteenth century, when Malacca controlled the Strait: costume, weapons, trade goods, dioramas of court ceremony and of the fall to the Portuguese in 1511. The gardens around it are pleasant and the building is one of the better places in the country to look at traditional Malay carpentry.

Highlights

• A reconstructed timber palace - built from the description in the Malay Annals.
• Carved hardwood joinery - assembled without nails, in traditional Malay technique.
• Sultanate galleries - costume, weapons and trade goods from the fifteenth century.
• Court dioramas - ceremony, and the Portuguese capture of 1511.

When to go

All year; mornings are cooler and quieter. An hour or two.

What to expect

It is a 1986 reconstruction, not an original building. Displays are dated in places and captions are uneven in English. It gets crowded with tour groups in the middle of the day.

Nearby

St Paul's Hill, A Famosa and the Stadthuys are all within a few minutes' walk.