History
The Perak Museum in Taiping is the first and oldest museum in Malaysia. It was founded in 1883 by Sir Hugh Low, the fourth British Resident of Perak ((1877 to 1889). It owes its establishment to the fund-raising efforts of Sir Hugh Low and Sir Frank Swettenham, Resident of Perak from 1889–1895, Resident-General of the Federated Malay States (now Malaysia) in 1896–1901, and Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Straits Settlements 1901–1904.
The museum was initially concerned with natural history particularly ethnography, zoology, botany and geology, all key areas of interest of its founder Sir Hugh Low. Its first curator was Mr. Leonard Wray Jr., a botanist, geologist and Superintendent of Government Hill at Larut (1883 to 1903).
In the beginning, the museum was housed in some renovated government offices while the main building of Neo-classical design was under construction in 1883. The building comprised an office, library and exhibition hall (Gallery A) and was only completed in 1886 due to lack of funds. In 1889, extensions to the museum's front and back were added. A new exhibition hall (Gallery B) was constructed in 1891 to 1893. As the collection of exhibits grew, a new two-storey building (Gallery C and D) were added from 1900 to 1903.
This museum should not to be confused with The Perak Museum in Ipoh erected in 1926 by a rich and successful tin miner called Foo Choong Kit.
Read more about this topic: Perak State Museum
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)