The Brunei Maritime Museum sits alongside the Brunei Museum on the riverbank at Kota Batu and focuses on the sea-trading history that made the sultanate wealthy. Exhibits cover traditional boat-building, navigation, and the maritime trade networks that connected Brunei to China, Java, and the Arab world from the medieval period onward.
The centrepiece is the recovered cargo from a sunken 15th-century trading vessel discovered in Brunei Bay in the 1990s — thousands of pieces of Chinese ceramics and other trade goods, now displayed alongside interpretive material about what the wreck reveals about the period. The museum is smaller than the Brunei Museum next door and can be covered in an hour.