Paddy Museum

Kedah is the rice bowl of Malaysia and the Paddy Museum sits in the middle of it below Gunung Keriang, in a building shaped to suggest stacked rice stalks and a traditional barn. The core of the visit is on the top floor: a circular room with a revolving viewing platform, surrounded by a continuous mural painted by artists from North Korea showing the paddy landscape, the mountain and the villages, so that as the floor turns the painted panorama joins seamlessly with the real view through the windows behind it. Below are galleries on the history of rice cultivation, the tools, irrigation, the calendar of planting and harvest, varieties, and the rituals attached to the crop. Outside, the actual fields run to the horizon and change colour with the season.

History

The museum was built on land of the Malaysian Agricultural Development Authority at a cost of RM24.7 million and opened on 12 October 2004 (Wikipedia, Paddy Museum).

What to look for

• A revolving viewing floor - turning under a continuous painted panorama.
• A 360-degree mural - the painted landscape meeting the real view through the glass.
• Rice cultivation galleries - tools, irrigation, varieties and the farming calendar.
• The Kedah paddy bowl - the real fields around the building.

When to go

All year; the fields are greenest mid-season and gold before harvest. An hour or two.

Before you go

The revolving room runs to a schedule, so there can be a wait. Captions are limited in English. Between harvest and replanting the surrounding fields are bare mud.

Nearby

Alor Setar and the Zahir Mosque are close; Gunung Keriang is beside the museum.

Key facts