| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
City skyline, above. The gleaming glass and marble of Sentral train station, below - REUTERS Kuala Lumpur may be the capital of a country whose leadership calls it an Islamic state but the city wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for an astounding Chinese man from Guangdong. Yap Ah Loy appears in early portraits as the archetypal "China-man'' of the colonial imagination. Seated in a broad-armed chair in a floor-length gown with wide sleeves, he's wearing a long necklace and a conical bamboo hat, clutching a fan. Yet Yap was a man of vision, strength and determination. Before he came along, KL was a collection of swamps and grotty shacks full of tin miners seeking riches before they succumbed to malaria. The miners were Chinese migrants. The ``natives'' in the area were not even that. Indigenous Malays were living far inland and far away, little seen by the new arrivals of the mid-1800s. Instead, the entrepreneurs who appeared to be the locals were in fact seafaring Bugis from what is now south Sulawesi in Indonesia, and a mix of ethnic groups from Sumatra. The Bugis are renowned to this day as hard-nosed traders who will travel and fight for markets and new homes. ``Like Vikings they fought in corselets of chain mail and made their temporary abode where their ships were in port,'' records JM Gullick, an expert who wrote extensively on the history of Kuala Lumpur. Once displaced from the Maluku spice islands by Dutch traders, the Bugis moved westward to the thriving regional port of Malacca, long before KL was even imagined. Brutal wars of commercial competition ensued amid conflict between Malay Sultans for control of the growing riches. Bugis controlled the coastal areas but ethnic Malays - from Sumatra - lived inland and were at odds with them. As a settlement, KL is only 150 years old. In the 1860s it was just becoming a flourishing village as traders moved north from Malacca, and world tin prices spurred a boom in demand and production. As seen in the name of the town - kuala means the mouth of a river; lumpur means mud, or mire - its importance derived from the use of the river for transport. On the eastern banks of the river, Chinese traders and headmen built homes, shops and godowns to take advantage of the tin trade. A vacant clearing on the west bank was used by vegetable growers. All around was jungle and swamp. Almost all of the first batch of 87 Chinese miners who struggled up the river from the port town of Klang died from malaria soon after landing in 1857. Those men had passed Damansara and Petaling, to work at a place called Ampang. Today Damansara is an upmarket neighborhood of large homes and government offices. Petaling Jaya is a modern satellite city of KL and 150 years of progress has brought residents manicured gardens, malaria-free homes and cute shopping centers featuring every latest brand product. The early exoticism of what was a pretty tough outpost is lost to the tourist. In modern KL, it's hard to imagine the city as a collection of shanties and shacks, offering opium and good-time girls to worn-out miners and secret society membership to men far from home in need of welfare. Gambling took place in a large open-sided shed in what is now Old Market Square. Hygiene and decency were in short supply. For the survivors, there was the thrill of hard-won riches and new land. Today's KL offers all the hygiene and decency once lacking, but perhaps offers a different kind of thrill. For most of these early Chinese settlers, all the law they knew was that of their secret society, through which they paid off their recruiting fees, took out loans and gained personal security. Membership was mandatory and provided the towkays, or Chinese bosses, with the means to control their labor force. But the societies also provided cash or food on credit, carried risks which individuals could not have borne alone and managed relations with the remote Malay sultans. Out of this melee, Yap Ah Loy emerged in 1862. He'd been recruited from his Hakka village in Guangdong when he was 17, and mined first in an area near Malacca. With savings from his next job as a camp cook, he invested in a few pigs and sold pork from mine to mine. Involved in fighting for control of the Rasah mines on behalf of his Hai San society, he rose through the ranks, and was then called by a friend to join him in KL. By the mid 1860s he was managing mines around KL. When his patron died in 1868, 31-year old Yap Ah Loy became Capitan China, the leader of the Chinese community of KL. Chinese records of the time, quoted by Gullick [in his The Story of Kuala Lumpur 1857-1939, published in 1983], explain his success: ``He was not very big or tall but when he spoke his voice was sonorous. His temper was like fire and he had the strength of an elephant. He could support the weight of 100 katis [60.5 kilograms] on his two palms when he stretched two arms forwards ... on his forehead between his eyebrows was a mark like a Chinese character ... His dignity frightened everyone into submission ...'' Yap Ah Loy is credited with saving KL at least twice, from civil war and then from depression, pestilence and fire. His support ensured the victory of the Malay leader Tunku Kudin as the indisputable ruler of Selangor, the home state of KL. By the mid 1870s, fighting, floods and depressed tin prices left KL in a shambles. Historians credit Yap Ah Loy personally with providing the spirit and the practical wherewithal to rebuild. ``If those counsels of despair had prevailed, the capital of Malaysia would now be somewhere other than Kuala Lumpur. But by sheer force of personal authority, Ah Loy held them to it,'' noted Gullick. A famous future British Resident, Frank Swettenham, said later of Ah Loy: ``His perseverance alone has kept the Chinese in the country.'' Yap Ah Loy traveled the area encouraging miners to start again and persuaded financiers in other settle-ments to provide credit. He personally guaranteed vast loans - at a whopping 20 percent interest - until the tin mines were back in production. But tin prices couldn't be fixed by Yap alone and by 1878, his creditors were threatening foreclosure. A dose of luck saved him when the tin price doubled by 1879. In one year, KL grew by a third and Yap Ah Loy became a rich man. ``Down to 1879, Yap Ah Loy was Mr Kuala Lumpur. It was his place,'' noted Gullick. British colonial auth-orities visited perhaps once a month from Klang, and enjoyed Yap's hospitality, happy to leave the squalid town's management to him. A year later when the British decided to base themselves in KL, they chose the western banks of the river away from the heaving Chinatown, clustering instead around what became known as the Padang. Now called Merdeka (Freedom) Square, this is the famous green where cricket is still played but now by Malaysia's mixed races of Indian, Malay and sometimes Chinese, instead of the sweating British colonialists. Today's visitor won't see this history surging along the streets, but pockets of it can still be found. Much has been said, particularly by the government, about how the country is ``Truly Asia'' with advertisements featuring exotic dancers from Malay, Chinese and Hindu traditions. But today's KL feels like a Western city parked in the tropics. Guide books from 20 years ago stress the combination of cultures on display, the strange contrasts between Malay headscarves, Chinese miniskirts and Indian flair. Nowadays, a more internationalist look prevails. A confusing collection of highways leads off into the suburbs, where the idea seems king that concrete must be painted beige-pink or perhaps orange-beige. Patches of old Chinatown have just survived the wrecker's hammer. An India Town, centered around the still iconic Coliseum Hotel, is an area rich in fascination. Brickfields - where bricks were first made to rebuild the city after devastating fires, again thanks to Yap Ah Loy - still exists. But visitors are likely to dash past it in a cab en route to the gleaming glass and marble towers of the Sentral train station, where the express from the far-away airport delivers the newly arrived. All the facilities are here, slick shops and Starbucks topped by the narrow towers of the Hilton and Meridien hotels. What was the original central train station is now a forgotten byway hemmed in by flyovers and highways. Train lines still go through the old central station, but only the enterprising traveller will think to stop at the old place for a snack or drink in the Heritage Hotel cafe, or even put up at this historic spot for a few nights. Here's one place which has escaped the neutralisation of modern KL, offering anything from backpackers' dormitories to spacious suites, off long corridors marked by colonial prints on the walls, sweeping staircases and a metal cage lift. Also clustered around the old central train station is the National Mosque, a wonder of airy Islamic architecture, where visitors must be prepared to cover up any flashes of flesh. The National Museum is near here, as is the elite 121-year-old Royal Selangor Club, which retained its monarchical appel-ation after independence. This is where the characters of Somerset Maugham's short stories gathered at the Long Bar for pink gins and in the rattan lounge chairs for tiffin. Now the club has a far more mixed membership, as befits a post-colonial capital, but the Long Bar still bars women. A mainstay of the club's finances is the gambling allowed upstairs, which subsidizes the cheap beer in the closed-off verandahs. This is not a place for tourist drop-ins, but if a member offers an invitation, don't say no. As with so much of KL, this area around the old station is a mini-hub which has lost its function. One glance at a city map tells the visitor that there seems to be no natural center to the city any more, but a selection of disparate centers which add up to a variegated city. Taken separately, they are an exotic mess. South of the old central station, and further south of the new Sentral train station, is the neighborhood called Bangsar, which offers a few blocks of excellent restaurants and bars. Variety rules: Bon Bon is a fetching place offering high-class French and fusion cuisine. Round the corner is one of the classic Chinese restaurants - quick, cheap and tasty. Five-star travelers will find themselves on the newer strip, northeast of the old center, where the still fascinating Jalan Bukit Bintang meets Jalan Sultan Ismail, which leads down to the area around the soaring Petronas Twin Towers. They were the tallest buildings in the world for four years, until Taipei's Financial Center opened in 2003. Bukit Bintang offers street life, shops and late-night drinking, and mid-range hotels such as the Federal Hotel, KL's first high-rise built on Malaya's independence from Britain in 1957. Walk uphill here to the Marriott or downhill to the Sheraton, or turn left on to Sultan Ismail for the Equatorial and Shangri-La hotels. KL's desire to be a super-modern Asian city is visible by just looking up - at the monorail trains sliding along above the roads. Nearby is the Jalan Berangan area which has become a Middle Eastern hub offering fun restaurants such as The Sahara Tent and cafes where smoking non-narcotic hubble bubbles is de rigeur. Yemeni food, Arab hair salons and travel agencies all cater to what tourism planners hope is a burgeoning Middle Eastern market. Turning right off Sultan Ismail on to Jalan P Ramlee will bring walkers to a lively bunch of late-night bars and restaurants, which leads to the towers. This is shopping mall heaven, with underground train connections downstairs and an excellent vast Kinokuniya bookstore upstairs. In between is every brand-name shop imaginable. For an insight into the middle-class Malaysia dream, set aside an hour or two for the towers. This is the most obvious legacy of former prime minister Mahathir Mohamed, who wanted this and other big projects to show Malaysia had arrived as a world-class nation. For those unchallenged by vertigo, tours are available morning and afternoon, at least as high as the connecting bridge 41 stories up between the two blocks. Just northeast of the twin towers is Jalan Ampang, home to more embassies and high-class condominiums. It is the site of one of the Chinese tin miners' earliest outposts more than 100 years ago. It was here intrepid miners and indentured laborers sweated in the swamp, fought for their secret societies and succumbed to malaria. The contrast between past and present could hardly be more stark. Yap Ah Loy cannot have imagined what form his gritty determination was to take. | ||
| ||
