Malay
The Towering Game

date: 2026-06-01

The Malay is the tallest of all gamefowl breeds — a strange, almost reptilian bird with a long S-curved neck, a hawk-billed head set low on the shoulders, prominent shoulder hump, and legs that carry the body almost a metre off the ground. It was one of the first Asian breeds known in Europe and was the model from which Buffon and Aldrovandi drew their natural-history descriptions in the seventeenth century.

A Bird of the Indies

The Malay takes its name from the Malay Peninsula, the long, narrow extension of Asia that includes modern Peninsular Malaysia and the northern third of Sumatra. The bird was known to European traders by at least the early sixteenth century — the Portuguese naturalist Garcia de Orta described fighting cocks from Malacca in his Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia (1563) — and it was being imported into England in substantial numbers by 1830, when it was the sensation of the early British poultry shows.

The Malay was a major influence on the Redshank of Stuart-era Britain and, through the Redshank, on the entire Old English Game landrace. It is also a major ancestor of the Indian Game (or Cornish) — the dark, heavy, broad-breasted bird developed in Cornwall in the nineteenth century by crossing Malay with Asil and Aseel, and today one of the foundation breeds of the broiler industry.

Distinctive Physical Traits

The Malay is unmistakable. The body is held at a steep angle, almost vertical, with a prominent shoulder hump and a long, curved neck that arches forward. The head is small for the size of the body — hawk-billed, with a heavy overhanging brow and a fierce, deep-set eye. The comb is strawberry (small and rough). The legs are very long, yellow, and powerful; the bird stands a full 75–90 cm at the shoulder.

“The Malay is the most peculiar of all our poultry — half eagle, half serpent, and all game.” — Lewis Wright, The Book of Poultry (1885)

Plumage is close and hard, running traditionally to black-breasted red but in many colours in the modern exhibition strains: white, black, spangled, pile.

Cultural Role

In the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, the breed was the principal gamecock of the pit until the twentieth century, when it was largely displaced by the import of larger, faster Oriental strains. The Malay tradition was carried to the Philippines, where it survives in several Sabong lines under the name Bulo.

In the West, the Malay became primarily an exhibition bird — its forbidding appearance made it a favourite of poultry shows from the 1850s onward, and it was one of the first breeds admitted to the American Standard of Perfection.

Conservation

The Malay is listed by the Livestock Conservancy as watch — fewer than 5,000 annual registrations in the United States, with most populations in the hands of exhibition breeders. Outside the show circuit, the breed’s numbers are smaller still.