Sultan Abdul Samad Building

Landmark 1897 Moorish-Gothic government building facing Merdeka Square, with its signature copper domed clock tower

The most ornate of KL's colonial buildings, the Sultan Abdul Samad Building stretches along the east side of Merdeka Square in a 137-metre run of red-and-cream brick, horseshoe arches, copper domes, and a 41-metre clock tower. Completed in 1897, it originally housed the colonial Secretariat for the Federated Malay States and is now the office of the Ministry of Information.

The interior is not open to the public, but the facade is the great photograph of central KL — best in early morning before the heat haze sets in, or floodlit at night. It served as backdrop to the lowering of the Union Jack and the raising of the Malaysian flag on Merdeka night in 1957, and remains the symbolic heart of the modern Malaysian state.

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A story
The architect Arthur Norman gave the building a style called Mughal Revival — a British attempt to imagine what a Muslim-Indian government building should look like, even though Malaysia's Muslim heritage owed nothing to Mughal architecture. The result became the city's most recognisable colonial landmark.