Sultan Haji Omar Ali Saifuddien Bridge

The bridge carries a dual-carriageway road across Brunei Bay, linking Kuala Lurah on the Brunei-Muara coast with Panchor in the Temburong district, and at approximately 30 kilometres is the longest bridge in Southeast Asia and one of the longest over-water bridges in the world, an engineering achievement that ended the dependency on boat transport between the two separated halves of Brunei.

Construction was technically demanding: the bay is shallow and tidal across most of its width, with soft seabed sediments that required approximately 6,000 pre-bored concrete piles to be driven to depths of up to 70 metres to support the elevated causeway sections and the navigation span that allows vessels to pass underneath.

The project was named after Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Saiful Rijal, the 28th ruler of Brunei, whose portrait appears alongside the Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque on the Brunei $100 banknote — linking the bridge symbolically to the national mosque and reinforcing the connection between infrastructure development and the monarchy's legacy.

Before the bridge opened in December 2020, the only land connection between Brunei's main territory and the Temburong exclave required crossing Malaysian territory at Limbang — a crossing that meant entering and exiting Malaysia twice (once into Sarawak, once into Sabah's Limbang enclave) just to travel between two parts of the same country, a legacy of the Anglo-Brunei-Malaysia boundary agreements of the 1950s and the 1980s.

The bridge has transformed the Temburong economy: the journey from Bandar Seri Begawan to Bangar, the main town of Temburong, now takes approximately 45 minutes by car instead of the three hours previously required by boat crossing via Brunei Bay, and the number of visitors to Temburong's national parks and biodiversity research stations has increased substantially.

The bridge crosses the mangrove channels of Brunei Bay, a Ramsar-listed wetland of international importance for migratory birds including the endangered Chinese egret (Egretta eulophotes) and the worldwide threatened Nordmann's greenshank (Tringa guttifer), both of which rely on the mudflats exposed at low tide.

Viewing areas at the Brunei-Muara landing point near Kuala Lurah allow visitors to observe the bridge's full sweep across the bay, and a rest area on the Temburong side provides panoramic views back towards the main Brunei territory and Malaysia's Sarawak coast.

The bridge is toll-free for all vehicles and is open 24 hours; an immigration checkpoint on the Brunei-Muara side processes the movement of residents and visitors between the two parts of the country, making it a domestic crossing rather than an international one for the first time in Brunei's history.

At approximately 30 km it is the longest bridge in Southeast Asia and one of the longest over-water bridges globally, representing a remarkable feat of civil engineering in a country of fewer than 500,000 people.

The bridge has geopolitical significance beyond its engineering: it physically reunites Brunei's two separated territories for the first time and has ended the dependence on crossing Malaysian territory to travel within one's own country.

It provides the access route to Temburong's national parks and biodiverse rainforest, making it the gateway to one of Borneo's last relatively untouched lowland forest landscapes.