Taiping, Perak

Taiping lays claim to one of Malaysia’s grandest collections of colonial architecture, its wide streets laid by the British in the 1870s. Taiping has it origins in the discovery of tin here in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Taiping stands on the site of the cold coal fields of Larut, which drew thousands of Chinese settlers during the mid-19th century. As a tin mining center overrun by enthusiastic prospectors, it had an unsurprisingly turbulent early history.

Originally known as Larut, the town was torn apart in 1871 by violent wars between vacuous Chinese secret societies, whose members had come to work in the mines.

On one day alone it was recorded that more than 3,000 miners were slaughtered and before long Larut was no more than a pile of cinders. A truce was finally declared in 1874, after intervention as a result of the Pangkor Treaty, and the town was renamed Taiping, meaning ‘everlasting peace’.

With the decline in tin mining towards the close of the 19th century, the mining population left. By them Taiping had become the capital of Perak, which occurred after the death of J.W.W Birch the first British Resident.

The completed of the Port Weld-Taiping railway in 1885 expedited urban development. Taiping began to be overshadowed by Ipoh and Kinta Valley in the 1890s.
Taiping, Perak