Perak Museum

The Perak Museum was founded in 1883 by Hugh Low, the British Resident, which makes it the oldest museum in the country, and it was set up in the way Victorian colonial museums were: to inventory the territory. The building is a white two-storey block opposite the old prison, and the collections have grown around the original core - natural history with a great deal of taxidermy in period cases, ethnography including Orang Asli material from the Perak interior, archaeology from the Lenggong valley and elsewhere, weapons, ceramics and the apparatus of the tin industry. Some displays have been modernised and others have not, which means you are looking at nineteenth-century museum practice as well as at the objects, and for a certain kind of visitor that is the more interesting exhibit.

History

Sir Hugh Low, fourth British Resident of Perak, founded the museum in 1883, the first in Malaysia, with fund-raising help from Sir Frank Swettenham. Its neo-classical main building was begun that year but finished only in 1886 for lack of funds, and its first curator was the botanist and geologist Leonard Wray Jr. (Wikipedia, Perak Museum).

What to look for

• Malaysia's oldest museum - founded 1883 by the British Resident.
• Victorian taxidermy cases - natural history displayed in period fashion.
• Orang Asli ethnography - material from the Perak interior communities.
• Archaeology and tin - Lenggong finds and the mining industry's apparatus.

When to go

All year; check closing days before travelling. An hour or two.

Before you go

Parts of the display are very dated and captions are uneven. Some galleries have been closed for refurbishment for extended periods. It is small and an hour or two is enough.

Nearby

Taiping Lake Gardens, the zoo and Bukit Larut are all close.

Key facts