National Textile Museum

The museum occupies a striped red-and-white building of 1905 on the corner of Merdeka Square, designed by Arthur Benison Hubback for the railway administration and later used by the public works department and the police before becoming a museum in 2010. Four galleries cover the material: the origins of textile technology and trade, the techniques - songket weaving with supplementary gold weft, batik with wax resist, pua kumbu ikat from the Iban of Sarawak, tekat embroidery - the jewellery and personal adornment worn with them, and the regional and ethnic variations across the country. The building itself is worth the entry, and the whole thing is small enough to do properly in two hours. It is one of the better organised museums in the city and unusually quiet.

History

Arthur Benison Hubback designed the building in the Indo-Saracenic Revival style, completed in 1905 as the headquarters of the Federated Malay States Railways; after the railway moved out in 1917 it passed to the Selangor Public Works Department, and it was gazetted as a historical building in 1983 (Wikipedia, National Textile Museum).

The main sights

• A 1905 Hubback building - red and white striped, on the corner of Merdeka Square.
• Songket and batik - the gold-weft weaving and the wax-resist dyeing explained.
• Pua kumbu - Iban ikat cloth from Sarawak with its ritual context.
• Adornment galleries - the silver and gold worn with the textiles.

When to go

All year; weekday mornings are almost empty. Two hours.

Good to know

It is a small museum and textile-specific - four galleries and no more. Lighting is deliberately low to protect the cloth, which makes some cases hard to read. Captions are good but dense.

Nearby

Merdeka Square, the Sultan Abdul Samad Building and the river confluence are adjacent.

Key facts