It takes 45 minutes to reach the town by land transport and an hour by boat from Sibu.

The town takes its name from the Kanowit, a Melanau ethnic group called Rajang by the Ibans (ISO 639-3: kxn).

[1][note 1] In 1846, Phlegethon ship commanded by Captain Rodney Mundy and James Brooke sail up the Rajang River to combat Dayak piracy that frequently threatened the borders of Sarawak (Kuching area).

[1][note 2] In 1853, James Brooke was able to take over Rajang River and its surrounding settlements from the Brunei Sultanate.

Therefore, Hokkien Chinese from Singapore and Fujian province of China came to settle in Kanowit during the 1870s, while Sibu was still a small Malay village at that time.

Chinese traders from Singapore brought clothes, jars, salt, and other daily necessities in exchange for rattan, hides of wild cattle, camphor, rhinoceros horns, and monkeys gall stones.

[1][note 5] In 1883, Father Edmund Dunn of St Joseph College, Mill Hill, England, established the first Roman Catholic Mission headquarters at Kanowit.

The missionary at that time worked almost exclusively amongst the Iban people[1][note 6] In 1885, St Francis Xavier Church was built.

[1][note 8] In June 1859, Syarif Masahor,[1][note 9] together with a "Kanowit" leader named "Sawing",[3] and a number of Malay chiefs killed two Brooke government officials, Charles Fox and Henry Steele.

[4] During the last years of the Japanese occupation, the Kanowit bazaar was looted and burnt to the ground by some natives.

However, several owners were unable to pay the mortgages owed to Chartered Bank in Sibu due to low collapsing rubber prices.

[1][note 21] The area around Kanowit contains mostly tertiary stage of Paleozoic rocks such as sandstones, greywicks, siltstone, shales, and slate.

[1][note 26] All the ethnic groups in the Kanowit Bazaar only started arriving in the last 200 years.

[3] In the 1970s, there were seven widely spoken languages in Kanowit: English, Malay, Iban, Mandarin, Hokkien, Fuzhounese, and Cantonese.

[1][note 30] Kanowit acts as a middleman of trade between the town of Sibu and people from the interior of the Rajang River.

At the same time, manufactured goods from the outside world are imported for daily use by the Kanowit residents.

[1][note 31] Among the items available for trade in the Kanowit bazaar are: hill rice, vegetables, chicken, pigs, fish, and fresh-water shrimp.

[1][note 33] Before 1970s, Kanowit acted as a transshipment centre for timbers coming from the Rajang upriver.

Kanowit have a dry and wet market, offering local vegetables, meats and handicrafts.

During periods of celebration, the local karaoke can often be heard from far away with the pounding basslines of 80s hits in English, Malay and Chinese.