The University of Malaya, Malaysia's oldest and largest university, has a 309-hectare campus southwest of the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

It was established in April 1949 in Singapore with the merger of the King Edward VII College of Medicine that had been founded in 1905 and Raffles College, which had been founded in 1928.

The growth of the university was very rapid during its first decade and this resulted in the setting up of two autonomous divisions in 1959, one located in Singapore and the other in Kuala Lumpur.