Stadium Merdeka Was Built In 11 Months, Without Cranes, On A Dining Table

Close to a thousand workers — Chinese, Malay, Indian, Malabari — built it round the clock without hard hats, safety boots, or overtime claims. They had one deadline: Merdeka.

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In Brief

Stadium Merdeka was designed by one engineer at his dining table and built in just 11 months without cranes or imported steel.
Nearly a thousand workers, including young Chinese women carrying heavy concrete loads, worked around the clock to finish before Merdeka.

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Kuala Lumpur’s Stadium Merdeka did not begin with a grand architectural firm, a glossy tender process, or imported structural steel.

It began with Tan Sri Stanley Edward Jewkes, an American civil engineer serving as Deputy Director of Malaya’s Public Works Department, sitting at his home dining table after work, drawing plans with a slide rule.

By the time he was done, the stadium had broken two world records.

It took 11 months to build.

The brief was simple, but the timeline was not.

Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaya’s first Prime Minister, had one instruction: build a stadium large enough to host the declaration of independence on 31 August 1957.

Groundbreaking was on 25 September 1956, which left 11 months.

Jewkes did not wait for completed blueprints before construction began; as soon as a single section was drawn, workers laid it on-site.

He designed the next section while they built the last one.

Retired civil engineer Lee Kwok Thye, who served in the three-person design office under Jewkes, recalled the method directly: “Jewkes never had the whole design completed, coming up with bits and pieces as work progressed.”

Lee’s role was to receive Jewkes’ handwritten calculations each morning and convert them into formal drawings.

The stadium was completed on 21 August 1957 — 10 days before independence.

No Cranes, No Steel, No Problem

The budget was approximately 2.3 million Malayan dollars — RM14.6 million in today’s terms.

It was not enough for imported steel, but it was enough for everything else.

Imported structural steel was ruled out immediately.

Instead, Jewkes used what was available locally.

The floodlight towers — which at completion held the world record for the tallest pre-stressed floodlight structures — were built from ordinary precast Hume concrete drainage culverts.

The kind used for roadside drains.

The entire complex, including those 120-foot towers, was raised without heavy cranes or advanced machinery.

Manual labour throughout.

The workforce was local.

Women are recorded as having played a significant role in the heavy physical construction work.

The Women Who Carried The Concrete

The workforce numbered close to a thousand, working round the clock, seven days a week, under floodlights at night.

Among them were young Chinese women in black samfoos, balancing pails of freshly mixed concrete on kanda sticks across their shoulders, navigating narrow ramps and pathways up the stadium structure.

Their faces could hardly be seen, Lee recalled.

They used to wind lengths of cloth around their heads, and put big hats on top to protect them from the sun.

The men mixed the concrete by hand and shovelled it into pails, and the women carried it up.

I felt sorry for those young girls. Their shoulders would be blistered, as well as their fingers. Those loads were really heavy. But they were poor and so they had to do it.

There were no hard hats; no safety boots and no overtime claims.

We didn’t really bother about clocking overtime. We just had one objective — to complete the stadium before Merdeka.

Two Contractors, One Engineer, Two World Records

Two contractors split the build: Boon & Cheah Co. Ltd. handled the earthworks, terraces and tunnel entrances, while Lim Quee & Sons built the grandstands.

Jewkes coordinated both — and designed the structure — because he was, by available accounts, the only person in the local civil service with both the structural engineering range and the proximity to Tunku to be trusted with a project of this scale.

He also did not charge extra hours.

Jewkes visited the site every evening after work without fail.

He had a car and driver — a rarity at the time, and in the afternoons, his wife would have the car bring her to the stadium with his tea.

“Mrs Jewkes was very gracious. She would insist I join them for afternoon tea. Unlike most Caucasians then, Mr and Mrs Jewkes had very high regard for Asians,” Lee recalled.

When the project was completed, Tunku hosted a dinner for the team at his official residence.

What Stayed Buried

The stadium site had been a football field called Coronation Park — uneven, with a five-foot fall from one goalpost to the other.

Jewkes’ first act was a drainage culvert to the road, so the northeast monsoon would not stop construction; it did not.

Midway through the build, earth-moving operators found human bones beneath the pitch; Lee told them to rebury quietly and carry on.

The turf was later laid by gangs of Chinese girls, rolled, fertilised and mowed — by Merdeka, green and level.

At completion, the stadium was the largest in Southeast Asia, holding two world records: tallest pre-stressed floodlight towers and longest cantilevered shell roofs of the era; Jewkes would later design Stadium Negara.

It later fell into disrepair before conservation architect Professor Ar. Laurence Loh returned it to its 1957 appearance and earned a UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award.

When construction was complete, Jewkes sealed a time capsule behind the foundation plaque — original plans, newspaper cuttings, construction records.

Years later, Lee was asked to locate it and found the original English plaque had been replaced with one in Bahasa Melayu; behind it, the capsule was gone.

No one has ever explained either.

The drainage pipe floodlight towers held.