Kota Kinabalu is the gateway to Borneo: the city almost every traveller passes through on the way to discover Sabah, that wild corner in the north of the island world-famous for its orangutans, its rainforests and its giant mountain. 'KK', as everyone calls it, doesn't dazzle with monuments —the Second World War left it in ruins and it had to be rebuilt almost entirely—, but it has a charm of its own: a relaxed, multicultural coastal city with vibrant markets, a wonderfully rich food scene blending Malay, Chinese and indigenous flavours, and breathtaking sunsets over the South China Sea.
Its big asset is its location. A few minutes away by boat, Tunku Abdul Rahman marine park offers five islands with white sand, turquoise water and reefs for snorkelling, an Asian Caribbean within easy reach. Behind the city rises Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak between the Himalayas and New Guinea, sacred to the indigenous peoples. And KK is the starting point for Sabah's great adventures: the orangutans of Sepilok, the wildlife of the Kinabatangan River, the world-famous diving at Sipadan and Borneo's deep rainforest. The city is the perfect base camp.
This guide lays out KK sensibly: what to see in the city (spoiler: the sunset is a religion), how to escape to the islands for a day and how much the boats and conservation fees cost, where to eat seafood and local dishes without spending a fortune, how to get around and how to use the city as a springboard to the rest of Sabah. Plus the practical side of a Borneo destination: carrying cash for boats and parks, preparing for the humid heat and understanding that the best of KK is often just outside KK.
Kota Kinabalu is a young city with an intense history. The modern settlement was born in the late 19th century as Jesselton, a trading post founded by the British North Borneo Chartered Company —the private British company that administered northern Borneo— and named after one of its directors. Before that, the area was a small coastal village known as Api-Api. During the Second World War, Jesselton was occupied by the Japanese and then flattened by Allied bombing, which reduced it to rubble; the same period saw the tragedy of the 'Sandakan death marches', one of the darkest episodes of the war in Borneo. Rebuilt after the conflict, the city became the capital of the British colony of North Borneo and, in 1963, Sabah joined the new Federation of Malaysia. In 1968, Jesselton was renamed Kota Kinabalu, 'the city of Kinabalu', in honour of the mountain sacred to the Kadazan-Dusun indigenous peoples. The full history of Sabah, the British company, the war and the native peoples is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The northern tip of Borneo: the 'land below the wind' of the British chartered company, with Mount Kinabalu, the orangutans of Sepilok and the memory of the Sandakan marches.
Read the history of Borneo — Sabah →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it was Kota Kinabalu, and even before it was Jesselton, this corner of Borneo's north coast was a modest coastal settlement known as Api-Api, which means 'fire, fire' in Malay. According to tradition, the name referred to the fireflies that lit up the mangroves at night, or perhaps to the fires set during raids by the pirates who plagued these shores. It was a fishing village of the Bajau and other coastal peoples, in the shadow (literal and symbolic) of the great mountain rising inland: Mount Kinabalu.
To understand this land, you have to look up, towards the massive bulk of Kinabalu, sacred to the indigenous peoples of Sabah. The Kadazan-Dusun, the state's largest native ethnic group, rice farmers and keepers of animist traditions, revered the mountain as the resting place of their ancestors' spirits. The name itself, according to the most widespread interpretation, comes from 'Aki Nabalu', 'the revered place of the dead' or 'the home of the spirits'. The mountain was the spiritual axis of a rich and diverse indigenous world, long before the Europeans arrived.
For centuries, northern Borneo was nominally under the influence of two great sultanates: Brunei to the west and Sulu to the northeast, which competed for control of these coasts and collected tribute. In practice, though, in the coastal villages and the inland highlands, life went its own way, shaped by fishing, rice growing and trade, and also by the piracy and headhunting practised by some peoples. It was a remote, green, mountainous world, and the great historical change would reach it, as so often, from the sea and from very far away.
The modern fate of this coast was decided in offices in London. In 1881, the British government granted a royal charter to the British North Borneo Chartered Company, a private company that, in the style of the famous East India Company, received the right to administer and exploit northern Borneo as if it were a state. It was colonialism in its most peculiar form: not direct imperial rule, but a profit-making business governing a territory the size of a country, collecting taxes, negotiating the transfer of rights with the sultans of Brunei and Sulu, and organising the extraction of tobacco, rubber, timber and other resources.
The company set up its capitals and trading posts one after another. After trying Kudat and Sandakan (which was the capital for decades), at the start of the 20th century it decided to develop the small port of Api-Api, on a sheltered and well-placed bay, as a new trading centre and terminus for the railway then under construction. In 1899-1900 the modern settlement was founded there and renamed Jesselton in honour of Charles Jessel, the company's vice-chairman. Jesselton grew as a port exporting rubber, tobacco and other goods, with a mixed population of Chinese (traders and labourers), Malays, indigenous people and a few Europeans.
Like all colonialism, this development had its dark side. The company's wealth rested on the exploitation of resources and labour, while the Kadazan-Dusun, Murut, Bajau and other indigenous communities were displaced, taxed or shut out of the profits. There was resistance: the most famous was the rebellion of Mat Salleh, a leader who rose up against the company in the late 19th century and became a folk hero in Sabah. But on the whole, northern Borneo entered the 20th century as a territory run by a British company, with Jesselton as its window on the sea, with no inkling of the catastrophe to come.
The Second World War hit northern Borneo with devastating brutality. In early 1942, Japanese forces invaded and occupied Jesselton and the whole of the company's territory, beginning three and a half years of occupation marked by hunger, forced labour, executions and terror. The local population, Chinese and indigenous alike, suffered fierce reprisals, especially after the so-called 'Jesselton Revolt' of 1943, an anti-Japanese uprising led by members of the Chinese community and local guerrillas that was crushed with mass killings.
The most tragic and best-remembered episode of the war in Sabah was the Sandakan death marches. At the Sandakan prisoner-of-war camp, the Japanese held around 2,700 Allied prisoners of war, mostly Australian and British. In the final months of the war, as the Allies advanced, the prisoners were forced to march on foot through jungle and mountains towards Ranau, in inhumane conditions of hunger, disease and exhaustion. Those who fell were executed. Of those 2,700 men, only six survived, all of them because they managed to escape. It was one of the most atrocious war crimes committed against Allied prisoners in the Pacific, commemorated today at memorials such as the one at Petagas and in Sandakan.
Liberation in 1945 found Jesselton reduced to rubble: the city had been flattened by Allied bombing aimed at driving out the Japanese, and only a handful of buildings were left standing, among them the Atkinson Clock Tower and the post office building. The British North Borneo Company, ruined by the war and unable to rebuild, handed the territory over to the British Crown in 1946. And so northern Borneo stopped being a company's fiefdom and became the Crown Colony of North Borneo, with Jesselton, slowly rising from its ruins, as its capital.
The post-war years were a time of rebuilding and major political change. Jesselton rose from its ashes: as capital of the colony of North Borneo (Sandakan, the old capital, had also been destroyed), the city was built again, this time with modern planning, and grew once more as an administrative and commercial centre. Meanwhile, the winds of decolonisation were blowing across Asia, and the future of northern Borneo began to be debated as part of a much bigger project.
That project was Malaysia. In the early 1960s, the leader Tunku Abdul Rahman championed the idea of uniting the Federation of Malaya (the peninsula, independent since 1957), Singapore and the British territories on Borneo, Sarawak and North Borneo, in a new federation. After debates, commissions and no small amount of controversy, North Borneo joined the project, on condition of special guarantees to protect its autonomy and its particular character. On 16 September 1963 the Federation of Malaysia was born, and the territory was renamed Sabah, joining as one of its states. (Those guarantees, the famous '20 points', and the degree of Sabah's autonomy remain a subject of political debate to this day.)
The final touch came in 1968: the city of Jesselton, whose name recalled a director of the old colonial company, was renamed Kota Kinabalu, 'the city of Kinabalu', in honour of the sacred mountain that dominates Sabah's skyline and gives the whole state its identity. The change of name was much more than a formality: it was the assertion of an identity of its own, Sabahan and Malaysian, leaving the colonial past behind and recognising the symbolic value of the indigenous peoples' mountain. The fishing village of Api-Api, which had been the company's Jesselton and the Jesselton of the war, was now the capital of a state named after a mountain.
21st-century Kota Kinabalu is a modern, dynamic and growing city, the largest in East Malaysia and the main gateway to Malaysian Borneo. With its international airport, hotels, malls and waterfront, it serves as the base from which thousands of travellers set out every year to discover the wonders of Sabah: Mount Kinabalu, the orangutans of Sepilok, the wildlife of the Kinabatangan, the diving at Sipadan and the islands of Tunku Abdul Rahman Park. The city that the war wiped out completely is today a vibrant, cosmopolitan urban centre.
Its greatest wealth is its people. Sabah is one of the most diverse regions of Malaysia, and KK reflects it: here the Kadazan-Dusun, Bajau, Murut and other indigenous peoples live alongside Chinese, Malay and Indian communities and a sizeable population of Filipino and Indonesian origin, in a mosaic of languages, religions (Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, animist) and traditions that shows in the markets, in the festivals and, above all, in the food. That mix, together with a laid-back coastal character, gives KK an atmosphere all its own, different both from the peninsula and from the rest of Borneo.
Like all of Sabah, KK has its tensions too: debates over the state's autonomy within Malaysia and the sharing of the wealth from its resources (oil, gas, timber, palm oil), pressure on the environment, and the challenges of immigration and development. But for the traveller, Kota Kinabalu is above all this: a friendly, flavourful city, with dreamy sunsets, ultra-fresh seafood and the sacred mountain in the background, opening the door to one of the planet's last great natural frontiers. Behind its modern façade beats a history of fishing villages, colonial companies, war and rebirth, as intense as it is short.
