Sultanate of Selangor

At a glance

Where is Selangor?

Selangor lies on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, facing the Strait of Malacca. A handbook of the Federated Malay States published in 1902 placed it "in the central and broadest part" of the peninsula, with a coast of about 125 miles, and estimated the total area at "about 3,200 square miles", roughly 8,300 square kilometres; the figure of 12,000 square kilometres on the map's dataset comes from the border data, not from the historical sources.

The state grew up along its rivers, from north to south the Bernam, the Selangor, the Klang and the Langat. Each river mouth had its chief and its town: Kuala Selangor, the first royal seat; Klang, the port of the tin country; and Langat with Jugra, where the sultan lived in the late nineteenth century. Upriver lay the tin fields of the Klang valley, where Kuala Lumpur grew from a mining camp into the capital of Malaysia.

Its neighbours shaped its history: the Sultanate of Perak, which conferred its crown; the Dutch at Malacca; the Bugis-led court of Johor-Riau; and Pahang, which intervened in 1785 and 1873.

Who founded Selangor?

Bugis princes from South Sulawesi. The Tuhfat al-Nafis ("The Precious Gift"), the chronicle of the Bugis houses written in the nineteenth century by Raja Ali Haji of Riau, tells that a Bugis prince, Opu Tendriburang Daeng Rilaga, a son of a king of Luwu, left the Bugis lands "to travel to the west". He "had five sons": Daeng Parani, Daeng Menambun, Daeng Marewah, Daeng Cellak and Daeng Kemasi. Daeng Menambun founded the line of the Sultanate of Mempawah in Borneo; Daeng Marewah became the first Yang Dipertuan Muda, the Bugis "Under-King", of Riau.

Daeng Chelak, as the name is spelled in Selangor (the Tuhfat translation writes Cellak), married Tengku Mandak, a sister of Sultan Sulaiman of Johor, and "became the second Yang Dipertuan Muda in Riau and its subject territories". The translators date his office to 1728–1745. W. E. Maxwell, the British Resident who summarised the chronicle in 1890, wrote that three of the brothers "established themselves in Selangor about 1718", and that Daeng Chelak's son Raja Lumu "was left there as ruler of the country".

According to the Tuhfat, Daeng Chelak's "second son was Raja Lumu, who became King of Selangor, posthumously entitled the Pious One". Another son, Raja Haji, became the fourth Yang Dipertuan Muda of Riau. The Selangor house was thus a branch of the Bugis family that dominated the Johor-Riau court for most of the eighteenth century.

When was the Sultanate of Selangor founded: 1743 or 1766?

Both years appear in print, and they mean different things. R. J. Wilkinson, the colonial historian of the Malay states, wrote in 1923 that the first Bugis settlements were made by a chief named Daeng Lakani, whose authority passed through the female line to Raja Lumu, and that "Raja Lumu began to rule Selangor about the year 1743 under the protection of his famous cousin Daeng Kamboja. At a later date he sought and obtained his own installation as Sultan at the hands of Sultan Mahmud of Perak." Maxwell had put the investiture itself "about 1743", while Wilkinson, in another chapter of the same book, dated it "about A.D. 1780".

The Dutch records settle the question. The historian Barbara Watson Andaya studied them in a 1974 article, summarised in the notes to the English translation of the Tuhfat (1982) that she prepared with Virginia Matheson. Selangor envoys went to Perak in September 1766. Raja Lumu "arrived unexpectedly at Pangkor about 24 October", insisted on entering Perak, and sailed upriver on 6 November. Declaring himself independent of Riau, he received "an orchestra of sacral instruments (nobat), regalia, and a royal title from the ruler of Perak". He left on 1 December 1766. The translators' index dates him as "S. Salih al-Din of Selangor, 1766-82", and the Malaysian historian Ahmad Farhan Abdullah@Zakaria gives the same dates for "Sultan Salehuddin, Sultan Selangor pertama".

Raja Lumu thus ruled Selangor from about the 1740s but became its first sultan only in November 1766. In the 1740s Selangor was still a Bugis base under Riau: the Tuhfat notes that when Daeng Chelak died in May 1745, his son Raja Lumu "was in Selangor", so the office in Riau went to Daeng Kamboja, and Dutch records cited by the translators name another Bugis, Daeng La Kanna, as ruling Selangor jointly with Daeng Kamboja in the late 1740s. The map's border data, which draws Selangor from 1744, follows the earlier date.

How did Perak install the first sultan?

The Tuhfat tells the story as a royal holiday. The King of Selangor "left for a holiday at Pangkor", an island off the Perak coast; the ruler of Perak invited him upriver, the two courts agreed, and "the Yang Dipertuan of Perak invested Tengku Raja Selangor as the Yang Dipertuan Besar of Selangor and all its dependencies, with the title Sultan Salih al-Din". Back in Selangor, the chronicle says, he was installed to the beat of royal drums, and "the oath of loyalty made the two countries like one".

The sources disagree on one detail. The Tuhfat has the Perak ruler accompany the new sultan home to Selangor. The Perak chronicle Misa Melayu says he did not, and the translators note that "the Dutch records agree with the Perak version".

Why Perak? The notes to the Tuhfat call the installation Raja Lumu's "declaration of independence" from Riau, which alienated Daeng Kamboja. Johor had long tried to win Selangor back from the Bugis: in 1745 Sultan Sulaiman ceded Siak to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in return for help in "regaining Selangor, Kelang and Linggi from the Bugis", and after the Bugis war of 1756–1757 the Selangor ruler signed a contract, on 8 January 1758, acknowledging Johor as his suzerain. A crown from Perak gave Raja Lumu a title that owed nothing to Riau or Johor. In 1768 Selangor refused to join a Riau attack on the Dutch post in Perak "because it was allied with Perak".

The link lasted. Wilkinson wrote in 1923 that "the Selangor crown is conferred by Perak" and that a Perak delegation had attended the installation of the reigning sultan.

What happened in the Dutch war of 1784–1786?

Selangor's first sultans were a sea power. Maxwell wrote that the Selangor fleets "were successful in Perak and Kedah (Alor Star in Kedah was taken and burned in 1770)", a blow to the Sultanate of Kedah.

Salehuddin died in 1782. His son, Sultan Ibrahim, "informed the Dutch of his father's death and his own succession in September 1782", in a letter to Malacca dated 19 September 1782. Ibrahim was the nephew of Raja Haji, the Yang Dipertuan Muda of Riau, and had married Raja Haji's daughter. When Raja Haji moved against Malacca in 1784, Ibrahim joined him: a Selangor force of 100 men landed near Malacca on 14 January 1784. The siege failed. Raja Haji was killed on 18 June 1784, by "a stray shot" in Wilkinson's account.

The Dutch took revenge. In the Tuhfat, the Governor of Malacca blames "the King of Selangor who had invited Raja Haji to attack Malacca". The Dutch fleet, under Pieter Jacob van Braam, left Malacca on 13 July 1784, and Selangor fell on 2 August; all the cannon and ammunition were taken on 13 August. The VOC signed a treaty recognising Sultan Muhammad Ali of Siak, who had sailed with the Dutch, as the new ruler. Ibrahim fled up the Selangor River and overland to Pahang, where, according to Dutch informants, he stayed three months on an island in the Pahang River opposite the house of the Bendahara, Pahang's chief minister. Muhammad Ali's nephew Sayid Ali stayed behind as regent; a Dutch envoy reported in 1785 that many people had fled and that he had confiscated their property.

The Dutch held two refortified stockades near the river mouth, "one on the hill known as Bukit Selangor (Fort Altingsburg) and the other on Bukit Tanjung (Fort Utrecht)". Ibrahim came back with Pahang's help. He reached Selangor on 24 June 1785, and his attack began on the evening of 27 June; English sources put his force at 2,000 men, the Dutch at 500. The Dutch garrison of 168 men abandoned the forts "at 3 a.m. on 28 June".

Dutch ships then blockaded the river for over a year, and rice became scarce. Faced with a new attack, Ibrahim negotiated, and on 29 July 1786 a treaty was signed. In the translators' words, "This established Selangor as a VOC vassal and gave the Dutch a monopoly of all its tin and other trade, but maintained Sultan Ibrahim as ruler." The Dutch had held Kuala Selangor itself for less than a year.

The hill at Kuala Selangor is today called Bukit Melawati, and the fort remains on it Kota Melawati. A 2021 study in the Jurnal Arkeologi Malaysia lists its monuments, among them the stone slab called Batu Hampar, the Hundred Steps, a row of three cannons and the lighthouse, and treats them as evidence of the early sultanate and of the colonial period.

Who were the Sultans of Selangor?

Nine sultans by the state's own count. The dates of the early reigns differ between sources; the main disagreements are shown below.

Selangor counts Sharafuddin as the ninth sultan. That count only works if the ruler installed during the Japanese occupation is included and Hisamuddin's two reigns are counted once.

How did Selangor break up, and who chose Abdul Samad?

In Ibrahim's long reign the British arrived. Maxwell wrote that "British political relations with Selangor commenced in 1818, when a commercial treaty was concluded with this State by a British Commissioner, Mr. Cracroft, on behalf of the Governor of Penang", followed by an agreement of peace and friendship with Sultan Ibrahim. Ibrahim died "late in A.D. 1826".

The succession then passed to a son by a lesser wife. Wilkinson explained that under Malay custom a sultan's sons by a royal wife took precedence; Ibrahim's only such son had died in infancy, so the throne went to Raja Muhammad. Muhammad, in Wilkinson's verdict, "was a weak ruler and allowed his kingdom to be split up for all intents and purposes into five petty States: Langat, Klang, Bernam, Lukut and Selangor proper. Of these five divisions Lukut was the wealthiest and most important."

Real power passed to men like Raja Jumaat of Lukut, a Riau prince married to the sultan's daughter. When Captain Macpherson, the Resident Councillor of Malacca, visited in 1860, he found that Lukut "can well bear comparison with any European Settlement", with macadamised roads and a brick-built Chinese street. Jumaat's brother Raja Abdullah received Klang as his wife's dowry.

The year of Muhammad's death is disputed. Maxwell wrote that he "reigned until 1856" and that Abdul Samad succeeded "in the following year"; Wilkinson has Muhammad die in 1858 and Abdul Samad elected in 1859; Ahmad Farhan and Gullick give 1857.

Muhammad's legitimate heir, Raja Mahmud, "was only eight years old", according to Maxwell. The man elected was Abdul Samad, son of Muhammad's younger brother Raja Abdullah and also the late sultan's son-in-law. Maxwell wrote that his election "was chiefly the work of Raja Juma'at, of Lukut", who feared the old sultan's family, and Wilkinson that Jumaat could not take the throne himself, belonging "to the Riau and not to the Selangor branch of the family", but forced through the election of his own candidate. Wilkinson added that he "seems not to have been installed in a formal manner by the Sultan of Perak". Macpherson's report of 1860 called him "an opium-smoker and a debauchee".

How did tin and Chinese miners change Selangor?

Tin drove Selangor's wars. Gullick found evidence that Sumatran Malays, chiefly Rawa and Mandailing people, had mined along the upper Klang River from the early nineteenth century. The decisive step came in 1857: "Raja Abdullah bin Raja Ja'afar, then district chief of Klang, despatched into the interior of Selangor a party of 87 Chinese miners from Lukut who opened mines at Ampang". He invested "some $70,000, much of it borrowed from Melaka towkays".

The boats that carried men and supplies upriver could go no further than the junction of the Gombak and Klang rivers, and a trading post grew up there. Gullick dates it to 1859, "established by two Hakkas - Hiu Siew and Ah Sze", though "it is not possible to determine exactly where it was". This was the beginning of Kuala Lumpur. Kuala means a river mouth or confluence, but Gullick pointed out that normal usage would have named the place after the Gombak, and concluded: "The name is a conundrum … There is no modern theory which satisfactorily explains the origin of the name 'Kuala Lumpur'." Nor is it known when the place acquired it.

The money came from the Straits Settlements: in 1866, Ahmad Farhan notes, the Singapore merchants Tan Kim Cheng and W. H. Read leased the revenue farms of Klang. Tin made control of Klang and the routes to the mines worth fighting for.

What was the Klang War?

The civil war of 1867–1873, also called the Selangor Civil War, was a struggle among Selangor's princes for the tin districts; Gullick notes that "Malay and Chinese contingents fought as allies on both sides". Its dates vary: the 1902 handbook of the Federated Malay States says the contest "was waged between these two Chiefs from 1867 to 1873", Gullick uses 1867–73, and Ahmad Farhan and the Klang city council date the "Klang War" to 1866–1874.

It began at Klang, when Raja Mahdi, a grandson of Sultan Muhammad, drove out its chief, Raja Jumaat's brother Raja Abdullah. In 1867 Tengku Kudin (Tengku Dziauddin), a brother of the Sultan of Kedah, married Abdul Samad's daughter. In 1868 the sultan gave him a kuasa, a power of attorney, declaring "that we give up the country with its dependencies to Our son, Tengku Dziyau'd-din, to govern and to develope for Us", with Langat as his base. Its wording let his British supporters call him "Viceroy".

Kudin besieged Mahdi's fort at Klang "for eighteen weary months" until it was evacuated, and Mahdi withdrew to Kuala Selangor. There Syed Mashhur, son of an Arab from Pontianak, sent to hold the fort for Kudin, changed sides after his brother was killed at Langat. On 3 July 1871 British landing parties from HMS Rinaldo, sent after pirates, were fired on there; the next day Rinaldo shelled the fort, and Kuala Selangor was handed to Kudin. Wilkinson recorded a grim local story about its fall: "a Malay chief is said to have cut the throat of an innocent girl and scattered her blood over the guns", and the slab before the gate where her body was left "is still shown as 'the Stone of Sacrifice'". Later that month, with the British envoy J. W. W. Birch present at Langat, the sultan confirmed the kuasa and re-nominated Kudin as "Wakil Yamtuan, Viceroy or sole regent".

The war swung back in 1872. Syed Mashhur surprised Kuala Selangor, and in October Kudin's garrison in Kuala Lumpur, under a European officer named Hagen, was destroyed trying to break out, with "119 men in all" lost counting Kuala Selangor. Swettenham recalled how the Chinese captain of Kuala Lumpur, unnamed in his account but presumably Yap Ah Loy, showed him a table in the market and said: "That is where I pay for the heads of the enemy; every head brought in and placed on that table is worth $100".

The end came from Pahang. At Kudin's request the Bendahara of Pahang sent an army across the mountains: Wilkinson counted "Imam Prang Rasul with 17 minor Pahang chiefs and some 2,000 followers"; Swettenham wrote of "three thousand men". "The fall of Kuala Lumpur was reported in March, 1873, and of Kuala Selangor on November 8th of the same year". The capture of Syed Mashhur at Kuala Selangor, in Wilkinson's words, "put an end to open warfare".

Kuala Lumpur, which Swettenham remembered in 1872 as "a purely Chinese village, consisting of two rows of adobe-built dwellings, thatched with palm leaves", "was completely destroyed in the last stage of the civil war" (Gullick) and rebuilt in 1874; in March 1875 Yap Ah Loy told Swettenham that "almost the whole of the present town of Qualla Lumpor had been built within the last year".

Who was Sultan Abdul Samad?

The sultan who reigned through the war, the British takeover and the founding of the federation, from 1857 to 1898. Frank Swettenham, who lived beside him at Langat, wrote that he "was supposed to have killed ninety-nine men with his own hand, and did not deny the imputation". In 1872, though, he was "living in retirement in a mud swamp on the bank of a melancholy tidal stream, and his manners were as mild as those of a missionary". He "lived to the age of ninety-three".

His way with rival factions became famous. Every party in the war claimed his authority. Asked by Swettenham what this meant, the sultan explained that to get rid of long-winded visitors "he said, 'Benar, benar,' which means 'Right, right'; but, he added, 'I mean right from their point of view, not mine.'" Wilkinson found that he played both sides: a letter under the state seal, captured in 1872, instructed a chief to help Mahdi against the sultan's own viceroy.

The traveller Isabella Bird, who met him at Langat in 1879, found him "the most prepossessing Malay that I have seen", and recorded what British rule had left him: "The nominal approval of measures initiated by the Resident and agreed to in council, and the signing of death-warrants, are among the few prerogatives which 'his Highness' retains."

How did Selangor come under British rule?

Through a case of piracy and, unusually, without a treaty. On 16 November 1873 a Malacca trading boat was attacked at the mouth of the Jugra river, near the fort of Raja Yakub, one of the sultan's sons; only one man survived. In February 1874 the new Governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Andrew Clarke, came to Jugra with Admiral Sir Charles Shadwell's squadron. The sultan, in Swettenham's account, called the affair "boys' play" but authorised a trial, and "sent a kris to be used at the execution". Seven men were executed on 16 February 1874. The sultan paid $5,000 compensation, "a sum which he promptly handed over in slabs of tin", and accepted a Resident. Swettenham later concluded that "the men who had been executed were not responsible for this particular crime".

Swettenham was left at Langat in August 1874 "with twenty Malay constables", living in an old log stockade whose mud floor flooded at high tide. A proclamation published in November 1874 announced the appointment of "Mr. J. G. Davidson, to be Resident of Selangor, with Mr. F. A. Swettenham as Assistant Resident". Davidson, a Singapore lawyer, was "a close friend and consistent supporter of the Viceroy". Ahmad Farhan dates his arrival to October 1874; the 1902 handbook lists his appointment as 20 January 1875.

Unlike in Perak, where the Pangkor Engagement of 20 January 1874 was a treaty, the historian Ahmad Farhan writes that in Selangor the appointment "tidak melalui perjanjian" (did not come through a treaty) but was linked to the wish of the Selangor aristocracy for a British adviser. The Resident was to advise the ruler in all matters except Malay custom and Islam.

Under British rule the seat of government moved several times. According to the Klang city council, "the seat of government was moved to Kuala Selangor in 1766, then to Jugra in 1859, and back to Klang in 1875 until 1880, when the state capital of Selangor was relocated to Kuala Lumpur." Isabella Bird wrote her letters of 1879 from the "British Residency, Klang", the town that was "after a fashion, the capital".

The move to Kuala Lumpur followed the tin. Gullick shows how fragile the mining town was in its first years: the London price of tin fell from £98 a ton in 1874 to £61 at the beginning of 1879, leaving Yap Ah Loy, "by far the largest employer in Selangor", close to bankruptcy, until the price rose again late in 1879. The capital moved in 1880. Yap Ah Loy's dates, 1837–1885, are those of his standard biography by S. M. Middlebrook and J. M. Gullick.

The New Government Offices in Kuala Lumpur, designed by A. C. Norman, were begun on 6 October 1894 and inaugurated on 4 April 1897. The building took the name of Sultan Abdul Samad in 1974, when the Selangor state offices moved to Shah Alam.

When did Selangor join the Federated Malay States?

In 1895–1896. "An Agreement was signed in July, 1895, by which these States were confederated for administrative purposes and a Resident-General appointed, with an official residence at Kuala Lumpur, Selangor." The four states were Perak, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang. The rulers placed themselves "under the protection of the British Government" and agreed to follow the Resident-General's advice "in all matters of administration other than those touching the Muhammadan religion". Article 6 promised that "Nothing in this Agreement is intended to curtail any of the powers or authority now held by any of the above-named Rulers in their respective States".

Swettenham, who negotiated it and became the first Resident-General, wrote that "the new departure was formally inaugurated on 1 July, 1896", and that the Malay rulers approved the scheme "because it did not touch their own status in any way". Both dates are correct: 1895 for the agreement, 1896 for the start of the federation.

By 1902 the handbook called Selangor "the second in importance of the four Federated Malay States". Its population had doubled in ten years, from 81,592 in 1891 to 168,789 in 1901, with the Chinese the largest group of newcomers. The State Council was headed by "Suleiman bin Almerhom Raja Musa, Sultan of Selangor", Abdul Samad's grandson and successor.

What happened to the sultanate in the twentieth century?

The court moved to Klang. According to the Klang city council, the sultan began living there in 1903, in the new palace Istana Mahkota Puri, a British gift for the coronation of Sultan Alaeddin Sulaiman Shah. The opening of the Sultan Suleiman Royal Mosque on 23 June 1933 "symbolically marked Klang as a Royal Town".

Sulaiman's son Hisamuddin Alam Shah was appointed Raja Muda on 20 July 1936. The national monarchy portal says he became sultan when his father died in 1937 (other lists give 1938) and "officially ascended the throne on 26 January 1939". During the Japanese occupation of Malaya by the Empire of Japan, the same portal says, he "became a prisoner of war until the British army reoccupied the Federation of Malaya in 1945". According to secondary accounts summarised on Wikipedia, which could not be checked against primary sources for this entry, the Japanese installed a former heir, Tengku Musa Eddin, as Sultan Musa Ghiatuddin Riayat Shah, and the British removed him in 1945.

After the war the rulers resisted Britain's centralised Malayan Union, asking in 1946 that "the separate position of the individual States and the individual rulers" be preserved. The Union gave way in 1948 to the Federation of Malaya, independent from 1957. Hisamuddin was elected deputy Yang di-Pertuan Agong, the federation's elected king, at independence in 1957, and served as the second Agong from 14 April 1960 until his death on 1 September 1960.

His son Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah became sultan on 3 September 1960 and was installed on 28 June 1961. He was elected the eleventh Yang di-Pertuan Agong on 26 April 1999 and died in office on 21 November 2001. Two sultans of Selangor have thus served as king of Malaysia.

Why did Selangor give up Kuala Lumpur?

To give the federation a capital of its own. On 1 February 1974 Kuala Lumpur was declared the first Federal Territory, according to the federal department for the territories, and was taken out of Selangor. The news site The Vibes, drawing on Mohd Yusoff Hashim's 1985 book on the sultan's silver jubilee, reported in 2022 that the transfer was initiated by Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak as early as 1972, that it took "almost 100 tabled discussions", and that the sultan "was not too happy" about it. An urban planner quoted in the article said that the sultan asked the federal government to fund a new state capital.

That capital was Shah Alam. The Selangor courts' official history says that it "replaced Kuala Lumpur as the capital city of Selangor in 1978", that its name was chosen by Sultan Salahuddin "in conjunction with the name of his late father, the late Sultan Alam Shah", and that it was declared the state capital on 7 December 1978.

Selangor gave up land a second time for Putrajaya, the new federal administrative centre. According to the Putrajaya Corporation, an agreement between the federal and Selangor governments was signed on 20 July 1995 under Article 80(5) of the Federal Constitution, and on 29 November 1995 Selangor approved transferring the whole Putrajaya site to the Federal Land Commissioner. Putrajaya became a Federal Territory in 2001.

Who is the Sultan of Selangor today?

Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah. According to the Selangor state government, he was proclaimed the ninth Sultan of Selangor on 22 November 2001, the day after his father died, and was crowned at the Balairung Seri of Istana Alam Shah in Klang on 8 March 2003. The Star reported that he was crowned by the Selangor mufti "in a ceremony steeped in Malay tradition and splendour". Born in Klang on 24 December 1945, he became Raja Muda in 1960. His heir is Tengku Amir Shah, Raja Muda of Selangor. His full style is Sultan dan Yang Dipertuan Negeri Selangor Darul Ehsan serta segala daerah takluknya, Sultan and Ruler of the State of Selangor and all its dependencies.

His powers are those of a constitutional monarch. Under the Federal Constitution, the ruler of a state "shall act in accordance with the advice of the Executive Council", but may act in his discretion in "the appointment of a Menteri Besar", the chief minister, in "the withholding of consent to a request for the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly", and in "any function as Head of the religion of Islam or relating to the custom of the Malays". It declares that "the sovereignty, prerogatives, powers and jurisdiction of the Rulers" remain unaffected.

Common myths about the Sultanate of Selangor

Timeline of the Sultanate of Selangor

What the map shows next

The border data draws Selangor from 1744 to 1876; at 1810 on the map it lies on the coast between Perak and Malacca. The end date reflects the dataset, not history: the sultanate continued under British protection and still exists. Its northern neighbour and source of its crown appears at Sultanate of Perak, and the Bugis-led court it broke away from at Sultanate of Johor. Pahang, whose army ended the civil war, and Selangor's partner in the federation of 1895 can be seen at Pahang Sultanate and Negeri Sembilan. Today Selangor is one of the states of Malaysia.