It was formed on 18 November 1968 by separating out the area of the historic Bencoolen Residency from the province of South Sumatra under Law No.

Spread over 20,130.21 km2, its area is comparable to the European country of Slovenia and it is bordered by the provinces of West Sumatra to the north, Jambi to the northeast, Lampung to the southeast, and South Sumatra to the east, and by the Indian Ocean to the northwest, south, southwest, and west.

[1] According to a release by Badan Pusat Statistik, it has the eleventh highest Human Development Index among the provinces, with a score of about 0.744 in 2013.

Traditional sources suggest that the name Bengkulu or Bangkahulu derived from the word bangkai and hulu which means 'carcasses located in a stream'.

The British East India Company established a pepper-trading center and garrison at Bengkulu (Bencoolen) in 1685.

The trading post was never profitable for the British, being hampered by a location which Europeans found unpleasant, and by an inability to find sufficient pepper to buy.

In 1785, the area was integrated into British Empire as Bencoolen, while the rest of Sumatra and most of the Indonesian archipelago was part of the Dutch East Indies.

Sir Stamford Raffles was stationed as Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen (the colony was subordinate at the time to the Bengal Presidency) from 1818 to 1824, enacting a number of reforms including the abolition of slavery, and the British presence left a number of monuments and forts in the area.

Despite the difficulties of keeping control of the area while Dutch colonial power dominated the rest of Sumatra, the British persisted, maintaining their presence for roughly 140 years before ceding Bengkulu to the Dutch as part of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 in exchange for Malacca.

[12] Bengkulu then remained part of the Dutch East Indies until the Japanese occupation in World War 2.

During the early 1930s, Sukarno, the future first president of Indonesia, was imprisoned by the Dutch and briefly resided in Bengkulu,[13] where he met his wife, Fatmawati.

Other minority indigenous ethnic groups includes Lembak, Serawai, Pekal, Enggano, Pasemah, Minangkabau and Malays.

There is also non-indigenous ethnic groups that mostly came from other parts of Indonesia such as Sundanese, Javanese, Acehnese, Madurese, Batak, Chinese and others.

The regencies and city are listed below with their areas and their populations at the 2010[4] and 2020[5] Censuses, together with the official estimates as at mid 2023 (rounded to the nearest 100 persons).

The province forms one of Indonesia's 84 national electoral districts to elect members to the People's Representative Council.

[citation needed] Agricultural products exported by the province include ginger, bamboo shoots, and rubber.