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

Georgetown, Penang

Georgetown is one of the cosmopolitan port city and the second largest city in Malaysia with more than one million populations, where commercial trading is still its major economic activity.

In 1786, Francis Light occupied Penang. He was a trader for the British East India Company, as a base for the company in the Malay States.

It was the commencement of the British forward movement in the area. It was expected to become a key port city in the island.

Light’s action was neither sanctioned by the East Indian Company nor acceded to by the Sultan of Kedah. When the sultan prepared his fleet in 1791 to take back Penang by force, Light moved first and defeated his adversary.

Light decided to clear jungle at the point of arrival and constructed central thoroughfares converging on Fort Cornwallis, namely Light Street, Beach Street, Chulia Street and Pitt Street.

Penang Ferry Service

The town was built on swampy land that had to be cleared of vegetation, leveled and filled. The British opened and established new tropical spice plantations in Penang to enhance the existing local spice trading activities with products such as cloves, pepper and nutmegs.

Immigrants from Southern China and Southern India were brought in to work as laborers, who later shifted to rubber and palm oil plantation and also to tin mining, as the former monetary economy was not so promising.

Most inhabitants concentrated in the central town, and various groups were segregated according to ethnic living quarters. Europeans resided mainly in the northern part of Penang, especially near Fort Cornwallis.

The majority of Chinese and Indians lived in the central business district, and most Malays lived in the southern part of the central business district.

To the Malays outside Penang and later the peranakan community as well, especially the non-English-educated, Georgetown was an alien term, so the town was called ‘Tanjung’.
Georgetown, Penang