Kuala Lumpur: A Dissertation, the Petronas Towers, and the Art of Begging

Malaysia’s history is worth knowing before you arrive, because it explains several things that are otherwise puzzling. The country became a British protectorate in stages through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Britain drawn in initially by the tin and rubber that the Malay peninsula produced in quantities that made it one of the most economically significant territories in the empire. The rubber alone was transformative: Malayan rubber, extracted by Tamil labourers brought from South India under conditions that would now be described as forced labour, supplied the expanding global demand for tyres as the automobile industry grew. When Britain finally left in 1957, it did so without fully resolving the ethnic tensions that the colonial economic model had created by importing significant populations of Chinese workers for mining and commerce alongside the Tamil rubber tappers, leaving a country whose three main communities, Malay, Chinese, and Indian, had not been designed by history to form a natural whole. The political arrangement that resulted is a careful management of those tensions, with affirmative action policies favouring the Malay majority, a constitutional monarchy with a rotating federal kingship shared between nine hereditary rulers, and an economic model that has produced genuine development while maintaining a political system that restricts certain kinds of dissent in ways that are worth acknowledging even as you admire the view from the Skybar.

The KL Tower, which predates the Petronas by two years and stands a few kilometres away on a hill in the city centre, is less famous and considerably more accessible. Tom, a Briton I met at BackHome who was heading to Cambodia the following day, came with me on an afternoon visit that nearly didn’t happen because we arrived thirty seconds after the official cut-off for new visitors. We begged. This is not something I recommend as a general strategy for museum entry, but Tom’s face during the process was genuinely affecting in a way that clearly moved the woman at the desk, and she let us through. The revolving restaurant at the top serves a good pot of tea. We were the only people up there, circling slowly above a city that looked, from that height and in that light, more coherent than it does from street level.

The dissertation was finished early, which was the first academic deadline I had met ahead of schedule in my adult life and which I attribute entirely to the fact that I had nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. The acknowledgements section thanked the people at my former employer who had made the research possible. I also quietly thanked BackHome’s staff for bringing me Malaysian food to try while I was writing, which was the kind of unsolicited hospitality that tends to happen in KL with a frequency that surprised me.

KL is an easy city to be in and a difficult one to love. The infrastructure is modern and the food is exceptional, the hawker centres producing a combination of Malay, Chinese, and Indian influences that is the direct culinary legacy of the colonial labour arrangements that brought those communities together, something that is worth remembering when you eat the roti canai in the morning. The malls are enormous and well air-conditioned. The traffic is considerable. The city is young by the standards of the region, established formally in the mid-nineteenth century as a tin-mining settlement at the confluence of the Gombak and Klang rivers, the name meaning muddy confluence in Malay, which is accurate and not the most promising start for a capital city but which hasn’t prevented it becoming one worth visiting.

I will be back in August for a Gap Adventures trip that starts in Bangkok and finishes in Bali. That version of KL will be different. Most return visits are.