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50 free Borneo trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Borneo trivia quiz covers the third-largest island on Earth, split three ways between Indonesia's Kalimantan, Malaysia's Sabah and Sarawak, and the tiny sultanate of Brunei. It starts with the map: the equator that cuts the island in half, the Kapuas and other great rivers, Mount Kinabalu, Wallace's Line and the drowned continent of Sundaland. Then it dives into a 140-million-year-old rainforest of dipterocarps, orangutans, proboscis monkeys, pygmy elephants, hornbills, the Borneo river shark and the giant, reeking Rafflesia flower. History follows: 65,000 years of human habitation, the Majapahit and Brunei empires, the White Rajahs of Sarawak, the North Borneo Company, the Sandakan Death March, the 1963 Malaysia Agreement and Indonesia's decision to build its new capital, Nusantara, in East Kalimantan. There are also questions on Mulu's Sarawak Chamber and Deer Cave, Sipadan's reefs, Kuching, and the palm oil and timber trades reshaping the island. Easy questions suit students; the hard ones will test seasoned travellers and naturalists. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on Borneo and its regions, wildlife and landmarks, and each explanation adds one further fact.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Borneo ranks where among the world's largest islands?
Third
At 748,168 km2 it trails only Greenland and New Guinea, and is home to about 23 million people.
Q 02How many sovereign states share the island of Borneo?
Three
Indonesia holds about 73%, Malaysia's Sabah and Sarawak about 26%, and Brunei roughly 1%.
Q 03What is the Indonesian name for Borneo and for its part of the island?
Kalimantan
Indonesian Kalimantan is split into five provinces: West, Central, South, East and North.
Q 04Which line of latitude crosses Borneo, dividing it roughly in half?
The equator
The island sits at the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia, north of Java and east of Sumatra.
Q 05Roughly what share of Borneo is Indonesian territory?
About 73%
Sabah and Sarawak make up about 26%, and Brunei about 1%; Malaysia's Labuan sits on an islet just offshore.
Q 06What is Borneo's longest river?
The Kapuas
It runs 1,143 km through West Kalimantan; the Mahakam, Barito, Rajang and Kinabatangan are the other giants.
Q 07How tall is Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak in Malaysia and Maritime Southeast Asia?
4,095 m
A 1997 satellite survey shaved six metres off the old figure; the summit is called Low's Peak.
Q 08In which Malaysian state does Mount Kinabalu stand?
Sabah
It sits in Ranau district and is protected as Kinabalu Park, a World Heritage Site.
Q 09Borneo was once joined to mainland Asia as part of which drowned region?
Sundaland
Rising seas at the end of the last ice age cut it off; deeper water toward Sulawesi forms Wallace's Line between Asian and Australian wildlife.
Q 10How old is the Borneo rainforest estimated to be?
About 140 million years
That makes it one of the oldest on Earth, dominated by dipterocarp trees.
Q 11Which tree family dominates Borneo's lowland rainforests?
Dipterocarps
267 of Borneo's roughly 3,000 tree species are dipterocarps, prized by the timber trade.
Q 12How many species of flowering plants does Borneo have?
About 15,000
Add 221 land mammals, 420 resident birds and about 440 freshwater fish, roughly as many as Sumatra and Java combined.
Q 13The Bornean orangutan belongs to the only genus of great apes native to which continent?
Asia
It is the largest of the three Pongo species, with arms up to 1.5 metres long and males that grow cheek flanges.
Q 21Which Sarawak national park contains the Sarawak Chamber and Clearwater Cave?
Gunung Mulu
A 15-month Royal Geographical Society expedition in 1978 was the largest ever sent from Britain and surveyed 50 km of passages.
Q 22For roughly how long has Borneo been inhabited by humans, according to archaeological evidence?
Over 65,000 years
Its hundreds of indigenous groups are loosely grouped as Dayak.
Q 23Which Javanese empire absorbed Borneo, and called it Nusa Tanjungnagara in a 1365 manuscript?
Majapahit
The court poet Mpu Prapanca named it in the Nagarakretagama as the island of the Tanjungpura Kingdom.
Q 14By how many did Bornean orangutan numbers fall between 1999 and 2015, per a 2018 study?
148,500
The rainforest is one of the endangered ape's last natural habitats.
Q 15Which large-nosed primate is endemic to Borneo's mangroves and riversides?
The proboscis monkey
Nasalis larvatus lives in all three of the island's countries and shares its forests with orangutans and silvery lutungs.
Q 16According to tradition, who introduced elephants to Borneo in the 18th century?
The Sultan of Sulu
Captive elephants were released into the jungle; the 'pygmy' label is misleading, as Sabah's adults match Peninsular Malaysian elephants in height.
Q 17Rafflesia arnoldii, native to Borneo and Sumatra, holds which record?
Largest individual flower on Earth
Its blooms reach a metre across and 11 kg, and smell of rotting flesh, hence the name corpse flower.
Q 18Which endangered fish is known only from the Kinabatangan in Sabah?
The Borneo river shark
The WWF said 123 new species were found on the island in the three years after the 2007 Heart of Borneo agreement.
Q 19Which Sarawak cave is home to over three million bats and guano more than 100 metres deep?
Deer
Nearby Clearwater Cave has one of the world's longest underground rivers, and Sabah's Gomantong is dubbed the Cockroach Cave.
Q 20The Sarawak Chamber, found in 1981, is the world's largest cave chamber by what measure?
Area
Discovered by three British cavers in 1981, it is 600 m long and 415 m wide; only China's Miao Room beats it by volume.
Q 24At its 14th-century peak, which sultanate governed most of Borneo's coast?
Brunei
Under Sultan Bolkiah (1485–1528) it claimed most of Borneo plus the Sulu archipelago; the interior stayed beyond anyone's control.
Q 25Which British adventurer was made Rajah of Sarawak in 1841 for helping quell a rebellion?
James Brooke
He had bought the schooner Royalist with a £30,000 inheritance; his family of White Rajahs ruled until 1946.
Q 26What was the name of the short-lived American colony founded near Kimanis in northwestern Borneo?
Ellena
The American Trading Company of Borneo set it up on land bought from Brunei, but it failed for lack of funds.
Q 27How many of the roughly 2,500 prisoners survived the Sandakan Death March under Japanese occupation?
Six
Of 17,488 Javanese labourers the Japanese brought in, only about 1,500 survived, mainly starvation.
Q 28On what date did northern Borneo join the new federation under the Malaysia Agreement?
16 September 1963
The Cobbold Commission had found the local population strongly in favour, despite Indonesian and Philippine opposition.
Q 29When did the Dutch begin posting residents to Banjarmasin, Pontianak and Sambas in southern Borneo?
1815
Their zone became Dutch Borneo, the ancestor of today's Kalimantan; the British took the north.
Q 30Which country began building a new capital, Nusantara, on Borneo in 2022?
Indonesia
It occupies land in East Kalimantan's Penajam North Paser and Kutai Kartanegara regencies.