The Strait of Malacca

More ships pass through the Strait of Malacca than through almost any other waterway on Earth. In 2025 Malaysian authorities logged 102,525 transits by large vessels, the first year above 100,000, or about 281 a day. It is the shortest sea route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, the lane that carries Gulf crude to China, Japan, and South Korea and brings Asian manufactures west. By the U.S. Energy Information Administration's count it is the largest oil chokepoint of all, with flows of 22 to 25 million barrels a day in 2025. Chinese strategists coined a phrase for their dependence on it: the Malacca dilemma.

The strait runs for about 900 kilometers between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, funneling from a wide northern mouth on the Andaman Sea toward Singapore in the south, where it joins the Singapore Strait and the South China Sea. Malaysia and Indonesia line its shores, Singapore sits at its southern gate, and Thailand touches its northern approaches. The water is shallow, in places only about 25 meters deep, and in the Phillip Channel off Singapore the navigable route narrows to about 2.8 kilometers. Those shallows cap the draft of ships that can use it, a limit known as Malaccamax, and keep the deepest-laden supertankers on longer routes through Indonesia's Lombok Strait.

For two thousand years this was the hinge of the monsoon trade. Srivijaya grew rich policing it, and the Sultanate of Malacca rose on it in the 1400s before the Portuguese seized the port in 1511, followed by the Dutch and then the British, who founded Singapore in 1819 at its southern tip. Piracy surged in the early 2000s, until coordinated patrols by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore and regional information-sharing brought attacks down sharply. Traffic has kept climbing, with ships over 15 meters in draft now about a tenth of the total. During the 2026 Hormuz crisis, EIA estimates show oil flows through Malacca falling to 16.6 million barrels a day in the second quarter as Gulf exports shrank, a reminder that the two chokepoints are links in one chain.

• Indonesia
  The world's largest archipelago, spanning two oceans bordering country
• Malaysia
  Two coasts of a peninsula and a slice of Borneo bordering country
• Indian Ocean
  The world's third-largest and warmest ocean connects to
• South China Sea
  Asia's contested crossroads of shipping and reefs connects to
• The Lombok Strait
  The deep Indonesian channel between Bali and Lombok that takes supertankers too deep-laden for the Strait of Malacca deep-draft alternative
• The Maritime Silk Road
  The monsoon sea lanes from China to India, Arabia, and East Africa, and the name of China's 21st-century port initiative historic trade route
• The Strait of Hormuz
  The narrow outlet of the Persian Gulf, through which about a fifth of the world's oil passed in 2025 linked oil chokepoint
• The Asia–Europe Route via Suez
  The main artery between Asian factories and European ports, through Malacca, the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal part of
• Singapore
  A global city-state at the tip of the Malay Peninsula southern gateway
• Sumatra
  A vast volcanic island anchoring western Indonesia western shore