Southwest of Miri, the limestone massif of Niah Cave holds one of the most significant archaeological finds in human history. The first foragers arrived at its West Mouth 50,000 years ago, when Borneo was still connected to mainland Southeast Asia by land bridges and the surrounding landscape was drier and more open than today's rainforest. In 1958, archaeologist Tom Harrisson excavated a skull from deep sediments in the cave, a find that stunned the scientific world. The "Deep Skull," belonging to a young woman who lived around 40,000 BC, was the oldest anatomically modern human ever found in Southeast Asia, predating even the famous Cro-Magnon specimens of Europe. Surrounding the skull lay evidence of complex funerary practices: Mesolithic and Neolithic burial sites that revealed thousands of years of continuous human habitation in these caves.

The locals had been extracting oil from hand-dug wells for centuries. A Song Dynasty Chinese document from the 11th century mentions imports of Borneo camphor and petroleum. But it took the eccentric administration of Sarawak's White Rajahs to bring industrial drilling to Miri. In 1883, Sultan Abdul Momin of Brunei ceded the Baram region to Rajah Charles Brooke, and Claude Champion de Crespigny became its first Resident. De Crespigny documented 18 hand-dug oil wells and recommended exploration near the Miri River, but was ignored. His successor, Charles Hose, picked up the thread. After retiring to England, Hose carried the idea to the Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company in London. In 1909, Rajah Brooke signed the first Sarawak Oil Mining Lease, and Royal Dutch Shell dispatched geologist Josef Theodor Erb to map the fields. Erb identified a hill above Miri, later named Canada Hill after a Canadian field manager, as the ideal drilling site.

Oil transformed Miri with startling speed. By 1914, the city had its first refinery and submarine pipeline. Roads appeared in 1920. The administrative center of the entire Baram region shifted from inland Marudi to coastal Miri in 1929. But oil also made Miri a target. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese reconnaissance planes were already flying over the oil fields. The British had anticipated this. Under a "scorched earth" denial scheme, troops from the Punjab Regiment and Royal Engineers systematically destroyed the installations at Miri and nearby Lutong rather than let them fall to the invaders. Oil production had already been cut by 70 percent before the Japanese arrived. During the occupation, food, clothing, and medicine grew scarce. Allied bombers periodically struck the fields the Japanese were struggling to restore. The Grand Old Lady survived it all, producing until her retirement on October 31, 1972, having yielded some 80 million barrels over six decades.

Walk through modern Miri and you hear the city's complexity before you see it. Indigenous peoples form the majority at over 61 percent of the population: Iban, Malay, Melanau, Bidayuh, and the Orang Ulu tribal groups including Berawan, Kayan, Kenyah, and Kelabit. The Chinese community, predominantly Fuzhounese with significant Hakka and Cantonese populations, makes up another third. In a single market, you might hear Sarawakian Malay, Iban, Malaysian Mandarin, Foochow, and any of a dozen indigenous Austronesian languages. The older generation often speaks fluent English, a legacy of British colonial education, while younger Mirians tend toward Malay and Mandarin. Two Christian revivals in the highlands, the Bario Revival of 1973 and the Ba'Kelalan Revival, transformed the religious landscape of the interior tribes, making Sarawak predominantly Christian in contrast to peninsular Malaysia.

Miri today bills itself as a resort city, but its real draw lies beyond the city limits. It is the principal gateway to four national parks and one marine park, including the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Gunung Mulu. There, the Sarawak Chamber, the largest known cave chamber in the world by area, sits beneath a mountain riddled with passages that took millions of years to carve. Lambir Hills shelters one of the most biodiverse plots of forest ever studied. Niah offers not just archaeology but cathedral-scale cave mouths. And offshore, the Miri-Sibuti Coral Reef National Park protects waters where the oil industry and marine ecology negotiate an uneasy coexistence. Back in the city, the Grand Old Lady stands preserved on Canada Hill as a monument, a wooden derrick overlooking the sea that made Miri's fortune. A time capsule buried at the nearby Petroleum Science Museum in 2005 is set to be opened on May 20, 2105, a century after Miri became a city.