World City Guide

City Overview

Kuala Lumpur is a city caught in a metropolitan limbo. It wants to be Singapore, but at times feels more like Bangkok and it is this tension between the clean, clinical efficiency of business-like Singapore, and the raffish rough edges of the Thai capital, that conjures up much of the Malaysian capital’s undoubted charm. In Kuala Lumpur, one minute you will be skimming across town on the new monorail with the Petronas Towers, the world’s tallest building, soaring confidently into the heavens above, and the next you are dumped at street level amongst the aromatic orgy of hawker stands and the unwelcome reality of nightmare traffic. This is all a far cry from the city’s low-key origins. When a huddle of poor tin miners first crowded around the mosquito-ridden banks of the slimy Gombak and Klang rivers in 1857, little could they have imagined that within a century and a half, Kuala Lumpur would have metamorphosed into one of Asia’s most vibrant and compelling cities.

Kuala Lumpur, meaning ‘muddy confluence’, has grown with bewildering speed since the tin mining days; a growth that took on epic proportions after independence and particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the ‘Asian Tiger’ economy propelled an ever-changing skyline. The speed of change has left old Chinese houses and faded colonial mansions idling beside huge gleaming glass and steel towers, while food hawkers and traditional fortune tellers share the streets with bustling businessmen and guidebook toting tourists. The city is not so much a melting pot or clichéd contrast between old and new as it is an ever-evolving jungle of buildings, which seem to have sprouted organically from the sweaty vegetation and murky rivers that still snake through the heart of town.
One of the most admirable aspects of the city is the level of tolerance displayed by its cosmopolitan residents, with ethnic Malays, Chinese, Indians and Europeans all living and working together with few racial problems – certainly far less than those experienced in Western Europe or North America.

To many Malaysians, Kuala Lumpur is quite simply the Ibukota (‘Mother City’) and as so it is treated with great reverence and abbreviated fondly to ‘KL’. Over the last few years, Kuala Lumpur has been emerging from the economic crisis that gripped the region’s economies in the late 1990s. A whole swathe of unfinished construction and infrastructure projects are now being completed and the development of Putrajaya, the new administrative capital, and Cyberjaya, the key section of the new Multimedia Super Corridor, are now steering KL back towards the course set by former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad with the aim of becoming a fully developed nation by 2020. Much of Kuala Lumpur’s future depends on the new Malaysian leader, Abdullah Badawi, who replaced Dr Mahathir on 31 October 2003 after his epic 22 years in power.

One constant in Kuala Lumpur is the climate, with consistently warm daytime temperatures, balmy evenings and afternoons that are often punctuated by thunderstorms, usually passing quickly to leave the evenings cool and rain free.