Penang State Museum, Lebuh Farquhar: Your Essential Guide

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After being closed for almost nine years for extensive restoration and renovation, the Penang State Museum on Lebuh Farquhar finally reopened in July 2026. Housed in a beautiful historic building in the heart of George Town, the museum has been given a striking visual makeover, with technology very much embraced throughout the visitor experience.

After such a lengthy closure, there was much anticipation in the local community about what the museum would look like and how it would take advantage of its iconic location. The result is slightly mixed and the overall impression is that an opportunity has perhaps been missed. Although there are undoubtedly some impressive touches, including clever interactive displays, plenty of photogenic corners and a fun use of digital technology, we found the experience let down by an uneven approach and a lack of accessible multilingual information, particularly for international visitors and families.

Here’s our honest guide to visiting Penang State Museum, including what to expect, admission prices and opening times, and whether we think it’s worth a visit.

Where to find Penang State Museum

The museum is located in one of George Town’s oldest and most historic buildings, right in the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. The building was once a school before beginning its new life as a museum in the 1960s.

Our review relates to the State Museum on Lebuh Farquhar, not the museum’s other location on Macalister Road featured on Google Maps.

Lebuh Farquhar only runs for a few hundred metres but is home to some of the city’s most striking buildings including the High Court and St George’s Church. It’s also within easy walking distance of Fort Cornwallis, Penang Town Hall and the Esplanade, while the historic streets of central George Town are also nearby. It’s also near to the start of our George Town walking tour.

Entry fee for Penang State Museum and opening times

The Penang State Museum @ Farquhar is open 9.00am to 5.00pm, every day except Fridays.

Admission charges for 2026 are:

Tickets are purchased from the machines located next to the entrance, payment can be made using credit cards or e-wallets (e.g. Touch n Go, Grab Pay, etc). Pre-booking isn’t necessary and staff are on hand to help you operate the machines if you need them.

What to expect from your visit

It’s the building itself that makes the biggest impression during a visit to the State Museum, with its history and elegance alone making the (fairly high for internationals) entrance fee worthwhile. Through every door and around every corner, there’s evidence of its past and you can’t help but feel that the renovation would have been even more successful if more of these features were incorporated into the displays.

Technology has been fully embraced throughout the museum; sometimes this enhances the visit, other times it feels like it just gets in the way. Buying tickets and items from the gift shop are all handled via a machine rather than a member of staff and English information boards are accessible only via QR codes (more on that later).

Each room and section of the museum is set aside for a different period or element of Penang’s history, including the building’s history as a school, the Japanese invasion in World War II, the development of George Town, the island’s wildlife, and much more.

Technology plays a big part in the new museum and adds an interactive element to the visit. For example, there’s a clever interactive display that contrasts historic photographs of Penang’s streets with the present-day, plus a carousel of mannequins in traditional dress that glide around at the touch of a button.

We preferred wandering around the original corners of the building, which have been left largely untouched and offer some lovely photogenic angles. You can feel the history throughout the building and our overriding feeling was that the displays didn’t add any value to what was already here. There’s an excellent collection of 19th and 20th century paintings scattered around the museum, perfectly capturing this early period in the island’s history.

Finally, although they were very friendly, it felt out of place for the museum staff to be dressed in camouflage uniforms, cautiously keeping an eye on the visitors.

The language problem

By far the single biggest frustration for visitors to the museum will be trying to understand what is written on the main exhibition information boards. In line with official government policy, the State Museum is required to prioritise Bahasa Malaysia in all display signs, regardless of whether the vast majority to visitors to the museum will be able to understand a single word.

As you walk past the displays, it’s impossible to know what is in front of you unless you can read Bahasa. The museum has decided not to print information in any other language alongside Bahasa, so the only alternative for the majority of visitors is to go through the cumbersome process of scanning a QR code for each and every display, signing in via a Google Drive account(!), and then reading the English-only guide on their mobile phone screen. It’s a terrible user experience that needs to be repeated hundreds of times if you want to read every sign, as it’s not stored in a single document.

After the first couple of times of scanning, signing in, waiting for download and then reading the slightly dry and dull text, we stopped bothering.

English is the only option which seems even stranger considering how many Chinese, Japanese, Korean and European visitors there are each year to Penang. Hopefully this decision will be reconsidered in the near future.

How long do you need at Penang State Museum?

Not as long as you might be expecting. We love museums and Penang, but even we struggled to fill much more than half an hour, even with intentionally taking our time. It’s a small space for a museum and it won’t take you much time to walk through the two levels, even if you’re especially interested in history.

It would have been longer if any of the display boards were in English, but we soon grew tired of reading a pdf file on our mobile phone. The minority of visitors who can read Bahasa Malaysia may get more from it, but English-speaking visitors have to put considerably more effort into accessing the information. If you can’t read English or Bahasa, you’ll need to rely on Google Translate.

Is Penang State Museum good for children?

Although the information online promises a fun-filled interactive visit for the whole family, the truth is that children won’t find much to entertain them here. As we mentioned above, the museum’s best bits are the building’s historical features, photogenic corners and oil paintings, none of which tend to score highly with kids.

Once again, the lack of non-Bahasa information is a barrier to entry, and most kids won’t bother reading the bland translations, especially if they don’t have their own device. So much context is lost without this information, and your kids will just end up wandering around. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t recommend it to international families visiting Penang, unless your kids are perhaps studying the region at school.

Gift Shop

Blink and you’ll miss it, the ‘gift shop’ is just a few shelves of art retrospective books, with payment made at the machine on the opposite wall.

Final thoughts on visiting Penang State Museum

We’d been eagerly awaiting the reopening of the museum for years, but it unfortunately wasn’t quite worth the wait. The grand old building is still the star of the show and it’s enjoyable just to walk around and soak up the history. Some of the technology is impressive in the museum, there are genuinely clever interactive displays, and you can see what the curators were trying to achieve, but it doesn’t quite land in most places.

By Penang standards, entrance fees are quite high for non-Malaysians and it doesn’t offer enough depth or immersion to warrant the ticket price. We came in expecting to spend a couple of hours here but were ready to leave after only thirty minutes.

While we understand the reasons for having all the signs in Bahasa, it feels a missed opportunity to have some other language represented, whether that’s English or Mandarin. We all spend enough time looking at our mobile phones nowadays, so it’d have been nice to have the option to read a proper signboard instead. English via Google Drive PDFs isn’t an adequate substitute for proper bilingual interpretation and the lack of Mandarin as a QR option is baffling, given how many tourists from China are in Penang.

We do think that the potential is there to make this a fantastic museum and hopefully now that the renovations are complete, there will be time and money available to go back in and improve the displays and exhibits. If you have spare time in your Penang itinerary and don’t mind paying the relatively high entrance fee, it’s still an enjoyable visit, just not quite as good as it could and should have been.