Olivier Hein, "Borneo: The History of an Enigma" (Hurst, 2026)

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

**Nicholas Gordon** (1:35)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast and partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and non-fiction authors working in and around the devalves of the Asia-Pacific region. Borneo, split between two countries, home to some of the world's oldest rainforests and a vast array of animal and plant life, is back in the news. The Isle is set to be home to Nusantara, Indonesia's new planned political capital, set to maybe open in 2028 And the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, different from the rest of Peninsular Malaysia, are griping for more rights and authority to control their own wealth. Author Olivier Hein tackles the long history of Borneo in his latest book titled, appropriately, Borneo, The History of an Enigma. He tackles the island's indigenous communities, the spread of Hindu, Chinese, Muslim, and European influence, the rise of the White Raja, and how Borneo is treated by today's modern nations. Former diplomat of the UN, the OSCE in the UK, Olivier Hein is undertaking hostings in Kosovo, Turkmenistan, the USA, and France. He is also the author of Star and Key, The Historical Adventure of Mauritius, and Mother of the World, The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan. He is also a regular contributor to The Chap magazine. Olivier, thank you for coming on the show to talk about your book, Borneo, The History of an Enigma. Let's talk about the geography of Borneo first.
The island is known for its deep jungles, it's got Codokinabalu on it. But how does the island's geographic structure affect the development of human society on the island?

**Olivier Hein** (3:12)
Sure. First, Nicholas, thank you so much for having me on the program, which is great. Let's talk about Borneo.
Let's not forget, this is the third largest island in the world. It's huge. It straddles the equator. It covers nearly 750,000 square kilometers and it's right, pretty much sat fat and plump in the middle of the Southeast Asian archipelago. I think there's probably four things you can say that dictate its landscape. It has a surprising mountainous interior, the famous Mount Kinabalu, which is over 4,000 meters is the island's highest point. But of course, it's famously defined by its dense and incredibly ancient rainforest. The oldest rainforest in the world, actually, 130 million years old and incredibly biodiverse. We'll talk about that in a minute, I think. But it has vast river networks flowing from the interior and overall a very humid equatorial climate. So it has a lot of heavy rainfall and it's pretty hot all year round. So I think when you put all these things together, you can say Borneo is immense and it was always, and actually still is, difficult to traverse. So there were always, geography would form some pretty natural barriers between communities. But I think it's also worth stressing something else about, people have been there for tens of thousands of years, but until 12,000 years ago or so, Borneo wasn't an island at all. It was part of this huge peninsula, which we now call the Sunda Shelf.
And it was only rising the sea levels after the meltings of the ice caps around that time, that turned it into an island. So as a consequence, you could say that there was never a huge number of people on the island then. And in many ways, it's not very density populated now until quite recently. Because of the challenges, I think, that the island presented, there was only five people per square kilometer. And I'm recording this from the UK and we have 290 people per square kilometer. So that gives an idea about the lack of density. But fundamentally, with that interior, which is so mountainous and heavily rainforest, those rivers became the primary highways for cultural development and trade and settlement that came thereafter.