Gateway to Mulu — the Sarawak oil city on northern Borneo's coast where Canada Hill holds Malaysia's first commercial oil well, and the UNESCO Gunung Mulu National Park's staggering cave systems — including the world's largest cave passage — begin 90 minutes away
Miri is Sarawak's second-largest city and the gateway to the UNESCO Gunung Mulu National Park — one of the world's great cave destinations, accessible only through Miri by air. The park contains the Sarawak Chamber (the world's largest known cave chamber, 700 m long, 400 m wide, 70 m high — large enough to hold 40 Boeing 747s), Deer Cave (the world's largest cave passage open to the public, 2 km long and 174 m high, home to 2–3 million wrinkled-lipped free-tailed bats), and Clearwater Cave (the longest cave system in Southeast Asia). The nightly bat exodus from Deer Cave — millions of bats sp…
The Miri area was historically inhabited by Berawan, Kenyah, and Penan Dayak communities living in the Baram River basin interior. The coast was loosely under the influence of the Brunei Sultanate before the arrival of the White Rajahs of Sarawak — Charles Vyner Brooke's Sarawak expanded to absorb the Miri region in 1905. The discovery of oil at Canada Hill in 1910 by Shell (Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company) transformed Miri from a small coastal settlement into an important colonial town; Malaysia's first commercial oil well (the 'Grand Old Lady', Well No. 1) began production that year and is pr…