Sultan Abdul Samad Building

The administrative block of the British colonial authorities was built from 1894 to 1897 for the Federal Secretariat — the office that governed the Malay States. Arthur Norman's original classical design was reworked in the Indo-Saracenic spirit: the eastern manner was suggested by the state engineer Charles Spooner, and the drawings were made by Arthur Benison Hubback and Reginald Bidwell — the same hands that later set railway stations and mosques in the same style across Malaya. The result was a brick facade one hundred and thirty-seven metres long with horseshoe arches, white plaster bands, copper domes and a clock tower forty-one metres high; the bricks were fired on site and were counted in the millions. The building faces Merdeka Square — the former cricket ground of the Selangor Club: at midnight between 30 and 31 August 1957, to the first strike of this clock, the British flag was lowered here and the flag of independent Malaya was raised, and now a ninety-five-metre flagpole, one of the tallest in the world, stands over the square. Later the block housed the country's highest courts, which moved out only in the early 2000s. In the evening the facade is lit up, and the skyscrapers of the business district rise behind its roofs.

On the map