Forest Research Institute Malaysia Forest Park Selangor
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How it came to be
The forest of the Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM) lies at Kepong, 16 km northwest of Kuala Lumpur. The land had been degraded by tin mining: almost all its original forest was gone, the hillsides held grass scrub and vegetable terraces, and the valley kept ponds left from the mines. In 1926 the chief conservator of forests, G.E.S. Cubitt, called for a separate forest research unit, and Kepong was chosen as its site.
By 1928 the first experimental plantations, mainly of dipterocarps, were in place, raised in the shade of nitrogen-fixing nurse trees. Plantations covered about 125 ha by the end of the decade, 154 ha before the Second World War, and some 220 ha just before independence in 1957. Over time the bare ground grew back into a mature lowland tropical forest.
The institute became a statutory body in 1985. It was designated a heritage site under the National Heritage Act in 2009 and gazetted as National Heritage in January 2015. In 2025 it was inscribed as an early example of ecological restoration that turned degraded land back into rainforest.
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