On the eastern end of Jalan Padungan, in the capital of Malaysian Borneo, a white cat two and a half metres tall waves at traffic. It has wire whiskers. At Chinese New Year somebody dresses it in red. During Gawai, the Dayak harvest festival, it gets an Iban vest. At Christmas, a Santa suit. That statue is the front door to the Kuching city of cats story, and the story is stranger, and far more deliberate, than the postcards let on.
The short version everyone repeats is that Kuching means cat in Malay, so the city adopted cats. The longer version is that nobody knows where the name came from, the cat reading is arguably the weakest of the four main theories, and the city committed to it anyway, with public money, a museum, a festival and a coat of arms. That last part is the interesting bit.
What This Article Covers
- Where the name Kuching actually comes from
- The Kuching city of cats timeline is shorter than you think
- The cat statues, ranked by sheer commitment
- The world’s first cat museum sits inside a city hall
- The wild cats nobody puts on the postcards
- Why the Kuching city of cats identity actually works
- Frequently asked questions
Where the Name Kuching Actually Comes From
Kuching was founded in 1827 by Pengiran Indera Mahkota, a representative of the Sultan of Brunei, and it was the third settlement to hold the role of Sarawak’s capital. The name was already in circulation by the time the English adventurer James Brooke sailed up the river in 1839, which matters, because it rules out the tidy idea that a colonial administrator invented it. Whoever named the place, they did it before the White Rajahs arrived.
Four theories compete. None of them has won.
The cat theory and its inconvenient problem
In standard Malay, kucing means cat. Case closed, except it is not. Sarawak Malay, the variety spoken locally, usually says pusak for cat. If the people living there had named their own settlement after the animals wandering the riverbank, the reasonable outcome is a town called Pusak. The cat etymology works beautifully for anyone who learned Malay in Kuala Lumpur and rather less well for anyone who grew up on the Sarawak River.
The three rivals: a fruit, a port, and a well
The first alternative is botanical. Mata kucing, literally cat’s eye, is a fruit (Euphoria malaiense) closely related to the longan and common across Malaysia and Indonesia. A hill in the city carries the name Bukit Mata Kuching. Naming a settlement after a prominent fruit tree hill is exactly the sort of thing people do, and it requires no cats at all.
The second is maritime. Cochin, the port on India’s Malabar Coast, gave its name to a generic term used across China and British India for any trading harbour. A Borneo river port picking up a borrowed trade word is unremarkable for the period.
The third is Chinese, and my personal favourite for how mundane it is. The characters 古 (ku, old) and 井 (ching, well) give “old well”, pointing at a well on China Street that supplied clean water during the cholera epidemic of 1888. The well would have been there long before the outbreak. The epidemic is simply the moment it entered the written record, which is how a lot of local history survives.
So the honest answer is that Kuching’s name has four plausible parents and no birth certificate. What happened next is the part worth studying.
The Kuching City of Cats Timeline Is Shorter Than You Think
People assume the cat branding is ancient folklore. It is not. It is a municipal decision from the late 1980s, and you can date it almost to the day.
Kuching was granted city status on 1 August 1988, making it the second Malaysian city after Kuala Lumpur. The same proclamation produced an administrative curiosity: instead of one city government, Kuching got two. Kuching North City Hall (Dewan Bandaraya Kuching Utara, DBKU) took the north bank. Kuching South City Council (Majlis Bandaraya Kuching Selatan, MBKS) took the south. One city, one river, two mayors and two budgets, an arrangement that still runs today across a population of roughly 515,000 in the two council areas.
The DBKU emblem, cats included, has been official since that 1988 proclamation. The first public display of cat artefacts also dates to 1 August 1988. The Padungan statue is usually described as the first cat monument in the city, though sources disagree on whether it went up with the city proclamation itself or in the early 1990s. Either way, the entire feline civic identity is younger than the compact disc.
That is not a criticism. It is the point. A city took an unresolved etymology, picked the most charming reading, then spent decades making it true in concrete and bronze.
The Cat Statues, Ranked by Sheer Commitment
Kuching does not have a cat statue. It has a portfolio.
The Great Cat of Kuching is the famous one, a 2.5 metre white cat with a raised paw on the traffic island at the eastern end of Jalan Padungan, beside the Chinese ceremonial gate. It sits almost exactly on the boundary between the two city councils, which means the mascot of a divided administration is parked on the line between them. The seasonal costumes (red for Chinese New Year, green for Hari Raya, Santa at Christmas, an Iban vest for the harvest festival) are the clearest signal that this is a civic object rather than a tourist prop.
The Cat Column, sometimes called the Chan Chin Ann cat tower, sits at the junction of Jalan Chan Chin Ann and Jalan Padungan. Four small white cats wave from a column decorated with Sarawakian motifs and rafflesia flowers, which is a very specific combination of the world’s largest flower and four grinning cats.
The cat fountain on the waterfront, near the Grand Margherita, holds a whole family: kittens mid-tumble with two adults watching. It lights up at night. Locals often rate it above the Padungan cat, partly because a litter of kittens does more emotional work than a single waving figure.
Nine bronze cats lounge around a pole near the James Brooke Bistro on the waterfront, sponsored by the Cat Museum, one of them in the middle of catching a rat. It is the only monument in the set that acknowledges cats have a job.
A pair of cats installed in 2005 marks the Malaysia China Friendship Garden near Kuching International Airport, a 2.8 hectare park funded by both governments. Diplomatic cats, effectively.
The scrap metal cat at the Esplanade, by the India Street entrance, arrived in 2015. Students from the UiTM Sarawak Faculty of Arts and Design built it from scrap supplied by DBKU. Locals call it Kucing Transformers, which is objectively a better name than anything a tourism board would have approved.
The World’s First Cat Museum Sits Inside a City Hall
This is where the commitment stops being cute and starts being institutional. The Kuching Cat Museum opened in 1993 on the ground floor of the DBKU building, on Bukit Siol in Petra Jaya, a hill about 60 metres above sea level. It is owned and run by the city hall. Not a private collector, not a foundation. A municipal government operates a cat museum the way other cities operate a water treatment plant.
The museum covers 1,035 square metres across four galleries and holds more than 4,000 cat related items: paintings, advertising, ceramics, photographs, taxidermy. The collection began as that 1 August 1988 display and moved into permanent quarters once the DBKU headquarters was completed in 1992.
Two objects do the heavy lifting. One is a mummified cat from ancient Egypt, which connects Kuching to the deepest layer of human cat history, the world of Bastet and industrial scale cat mummification. The other is a preserved bay cat specimen, which the museum describes as the only one of its kind on display anywhere. Five wild cat species native to Borneo are covered in the galleries.
Entry is free. Bringing a camera costs extra, a pricing model that feels like it was designed in 1993 and never revisited.
The Wild Cats Nobody Puts on the Postcards
Here is the irony at the centre of the whole project. Kuching has cats on its roundabouts, its letterhead and its souvenirs, and almost nobody who lives there has seen the island’s most remarkable cat.
The bay cat (Catopuma badia) is endemic to Borneo and exists nowhere else on Earth. It was first described in 1874, from the skull of a poorly preserved specimen collected in 1855, and for well over a century afterwards scientists worked with scraps. It has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2002, with fewer than 2,500 mature individuals estimated and more recent figures pointing to roughly 2,200. Records exist from most regions of Borneo, with the notable absence of Brunei and South Kalimantan.
A camera trap image of a bay cat is still a minor event among field biologists. The animal lives in the rainforest that surrounds the city, in the same green mass that makes visitors reach for words about the calming effect of time spent among trees, and it stays invisible. The mascot cats wave at traffic. The real endemic cat does everything it can to avoid being photographed, which, frankly, is the more authentically feline behaviour of the two.
Why the Kuching City of Cats Identity Actually Works
DBKU runs the Kuching International Cat Festival on the Kuching Waterfront. The 2025 edition ran from 26 to 28 September, timed with the Kuching Festival and the 37th Kuching City Day, and drew more than 240 cats from Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, China, Vietnam and Indonesia, with a World Cat Show and a cat parade. The 2026 edition is scheduled for the waterfront from 2 to 4 October. A city council that counts its own birthdays in Cat Days has stopped hedging.
The strategic logic underneath is sharper than it looks. Kuching is a genuinely plural city: Malay, Chinese, Iban, Bidayuh, Indian and more, with three or four religious calendars running at once. Most historical symbols available to it are contested. The Brooke dynasty ran Sarawak as a private kingdom from 1841 until the cession to the British Crown in 1946, with the Japanese occupation from December 1941 in between and the Astana, built in 1869 as a wedding gift for Charles Brooke’s wife, still sitting across the river. Every one of those threads carries an argument.
A cat carries none. It predates the colonial period, belongs to no ethnic group, appears in Malay, Chinese and Dayak daily life alike, and can wear four different festival outfits in one calendar year without anybody filing a complaint. Compare that with how much cultural baggage cats drag around elsewhere, where centuries of black cat superstition and persecution still shape how people react to one crossing a road. Kuching found a symbol with essentially zero downside and used it.
What other cities could take from this
Plenty of places have a folk etymology sitting unused in a tourism brochure. Very few do what Kuching did with it, which came down to three choices.
The first was to pick the reading people enjoy over the one that is most defensible. Historians can keep arguing about the well and the fruit. The statues went up regardless. The second was to fund it municipally instead of leaving it to gift shops. Statues, a museum inside the city hall, an international festival and a coat of arms are budget line items, not merchandise.
The third was to keep it light. Nothing about a scrap metal cat nicknamed Kucing Transformers is solemn. That refusal to take itself seriously is what makes the identity durable, and it rhymes with a broader idea about finding value in things that are imperfect and unpolished rather than waiting for a flawless brand strategy. It is also a decent argument for doing fewer things on purpose and doing them properly over forty years.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Kuching actually mean cat?
Possibly, but it is unproven. Kucing is cat in standard Malay, yet Sarawak Malay generally uses pusak, which weakens the case. Three other explanations compete: the mata kucing fruit and the hill named after it, the port name Cochin used as a generic word for trading harbour, and the Chinese phrase for “old well”. The name was in use before 1839.
When did Kuching become the City of Cats?
The identity was formalised around 1 August 1988, when Kuching was granted city status as Malaysia’s second city after Kuala Lumpur. The DBKU emblem with its cats dates from that proclamation, the first cat artefact display opened the same day, and the Cat Museum followed in 1993.
What is inside the Kuching Cat Museum?
More than 4,000 cat related items across four galleries and 1,035 square metres, including a mummified cat from ancient Egypt, a preserved bay cat specimen and material on the five wild cat species native to Borneo. It is on Bukit Siol in Petra Jaya, on the ground floor of the Kuching North City Hall building. Admission is free, with a fee for cameras.
How many cat statues does Kuching have?
At least seven major installations are commonly listed, including the Great Cat of Kuching at the Padungan roundabout, the Cat Column at Jalan Chan Chin Ann, the waterfront cat fountain with its kitten family, nine bronze cats near the old waterfront, the 2005 pair at the Malaysia China Friendship Garden and the 2015 scrap metal cat at the Esplanade.
Are there wild cats in Borneo?
Yes. Five wild cat species live on the island, and the bay cat (Catopuma badia) is found nowhere else. It has been listed as Endangered since 2002, with an estimated population of roughly 2,200 mature individuals, and it is one of the least observed cats on Earth. Domestic cats in Kuching, by contrast, behave exactly like domestic cats everywhere, including the habit of pushing objects off flat surfaces.
The Verdict From the Roundabout
Kuching took a name with four possible origins, chose the one with whiskers, and then backed it with statues, a municipal museum, an international festival and a coat of arms. Nearly forty years on, the choice looks less like a marketing gimmick and more like good civic design: a symbol that unites a plural city, costs little to maintain and photographs well in every season. The real Bornean cat still hides in the forest, unbothered and largely unphotographed. The concrete one keeps waving at traffic. Both, in their own way, are doing the job properly.
🐾 Visit the Pudgy Cat Shop for prints and cat-approved goodies, or find our illustrated books on Amazon.
Leave a Reply