News of lavish new Terengganu palace goes viral, gets slammed by netizens

The beautiful new 100-room palace recently constructed in Kuala Terengganu for the state's monarch has struck a sour note with many Malaysians, who are questioning the need for such a lavish new structure at a time when many citizens are tigtening belts due to financial constraints.

The story was picked up by local media after photographer Benjamin Wong published a Youtube video (which has since been made unavailble to the public) and story on Medium earlier this week, detailing the palace's beautiful architecture and design. Since then, the story has gone viral, with an article on The Malay Mail Online getting almost 700 shares and a Malaysiakini Facebook post racking up almost 50 shares and over 230 likes.

The new palace is really magnificent. It has over a 100 rooms (including a private mosque and extravagant halls),  14 ton bronze doors and halls over three stories high. The company that designed and built the palace reportedly created over 5,000 drawings, some of them over 9 meters in length, when conceptualising it.

However, the public reaction to the palace has been less of awe and more of anger. While there are some who marvel at its beauty, many have slammed its construction, calling it a waste of money and questioning why it had to be built and how it was financed.

Here are some of the reactions, good and bad, to the opulent new palace:

The palace was designed and constructed by Bangkok-based architect Bill Bensley, who was commissioned by Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin around 2004, when he attended a wedding at the hilltop home of Malaysian entrepreneur Mahamad Fathil Mahmood's in Kuang and was blown away by its architecture. Zainal interviewed Bensley and then commissioned him to build a new palace inspired by designs from Fathil's estate as well as Alhambran architecture.

Bensley uploaded this YouTube video late last year, detailing how the palace was commissioned and what it looks like.