The hydrocarbon-rich southeastern margin of the South China Sea is divided by NW-SE lineaments into a series of sharply contrasting segments distinguished by, among other things, abrupt changes in gravity patterns. The Sabah segment is bounded to the SW by the Tinjar or West Baram line and to the NE by the Balabac line at the southwest margin of the Sulu Sea. The most prominent gravitational feature of this segment is the strong freeair gravity low associated with the Sabah Trough which lies about 150 km offshore. Seismic reflection data suggest that loading by prograding sediments and gravity driven thrust sheets has depressed the extended continental crust of the South China Sea below its level of local isostatic compensation, producing the trough as a foreland basin in which sedimentation has failed to keep pace with subsidence. The load masses themselves, supported in part by the rigidity of the underlying crust and lithosphere, are above their levels of local compensation and deep Neogene sedimentary basins lie on the flanks of Bouguer and free-air gravity highs. Gravity values decrease across the Sabah coast so that the Crocker Ranges, including Mt Kinabalu, rest in rough isostatic equilibrium on presumably weaker lithosphere. The free-air gravity anomaly associated with the Sabah Trough is smaller than would have been predicted from the thickness of the water column, suggesting crustal thinning beneath the trough axis. This is not a characteristic of normal foreland basins and can therefore be assumed to predate basin formation. It can be concluded that the NE-SW trending belts of parallel gravity anomaly and geomorphology, of which the Sabah Trough is the most obvious, have been controlled by the pre-existing fabric of the crust and lithosphere of the South China Sea since they are discordant to the Palaeogene geological trends in Sabah. Reconstructions of the Tertiary history of the Sabah segment can be based on this assumption, which also suggests that sediments deposited in rift basins formed during the Palaeogene break-up of the South China margin were the source for much, if not all, of the hydrocarbon reserves of the area.