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

Brief history of Riau Islands

The Riau Islands have played a significant role in the cultural history of Indonesia, being the cradle of the form of Malay that became the national language and major center of classical Malay civilization.

Riau’s position at the southern entrance to the Strait of Malacca, the gateway for trade between India and China, was strategically significant.

There were small trading settlements on the Riau and Lingga archipelagos from at least the time of the empire of Srivijaya, which was established in southern Sumatra from the seventh century. It was said that the sea nomads of Riau made up opart of 20,000 strong military force of the Srivijaya ruler around 683 AD.

By about 1000 the island of Bintan was emerging as dominant, and it was to this island that Sultan Mahmud I of Malacca fled when the Portuguese captures his capital in 1511.

From the 16th century, the Riau Islands were ruled by a variety of Malay Kingdoms, which had to fight off constant attacks by pirates and the opportunistic Portuguese, Dutch and English.

Riau’s Golden Age, when it was at the height of its cultural and religious influence, was from around the middle of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century. At that time Bintan became an international center for the exchange of opium, tin, peeper, cloth, gambier and spices.

The Dutch then won controlled over the Strait of Malacca and mainland Riau became their colony when the Sultan of Johor surrendered in 1745.

In 1824 the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London completed and Riau Islands became part of the Dutch colony of what became known as the Netherlands East Indies.

The last Sultan of Riau was finally forced to abdicate by the Dutch colonial authorities in 1911.
Brief history of Riau Islands