Cover photo: Fort Batu Maung straddles the adjoining hillocks of Bukit Batu Maung, Bukit Teluk Tempoyak and Bukit Payung. The location offers a commanding view of the approaches to the South Channel. According to a 1976 news report, “The 33-acre site belongs to the State Government”.
IN 1980, teenager Andrew Hwang accompanied his father and other Public Works Department employees to inspect an abandoned British fort atop a hillock in Batu Maung. The jungle had begun to reclaim everything—barracks stripped bare, doorless ammunition stores gaping, concrete slowly surrendering to vines.
Hwang—now a lawyer and local historian—recounted this scene of tropical decay to me recently. He was one of the few who had seen the place before its transformation in 2002 into what journalist Natasha Venner-Pack describes as “a privately owned museum-cum-theme park, with… a paintball field attached.” When James Jeremiah revisited the fort in 2016, having served there as an 18-year-old in the Eurasian “E” Company, he laughed: “Everything has changed. I don’t remember any of this being here!”
With the fort’s history now tangled in commercial entertainment, its actual story has become increasingly unclear. Using declassified top-secret British and Australian military reports, this article reconstructs what really happened—a tragic tale set at the very beginning of the end of the British Empire.
