Medan Pasar Shaped Modern KL and Is Being Reborn

They say understanding our past illuminates our future. As a young capital, Kuala Lumpur is a city of layers. It is a diverse tapestry shaped over the last centuries by the subtle mark of indigenous tribes, the ambitions of migrants, and the royal families and treaties between them. It was forged by tin and rubber, disease, and colonial rule, then tested by riots, fires, floods, and wars. And it was carried forward by the automotive industry, independence, commercial trade, finance, and the race to become a developed nation.

It is, in other words, a history with too many authors to fit into a single narrative. Presumably, this is why leading architectural historian Robert Powell has woven it through 300-plus pages in his latest book, Medan Pasar: the Old Market Square of Kuala Lumpur. Well-researched and thorough, it’s a story for those who call KL home—best sat with during a rainy week to slowly absorb how it came to be. Did you know Taiping, once tipped as the federal capital, narrowly missed out?

An Archival Foundation

In the last few years, you may have heard and seen the ambitious, much-anticipated restoration of Medan Pasar, driven by the Creador Foundation and Alaka Holdings, in partnership with Warisan KL and DBKL. It is a major, multi-million-ringgit revitalisation fuelled by passion, a tad of sentimentality, and a generous commitment to safeguarding our history and heritage before it is lost to time and progress.

Powell’s book provides the archival foundation for the project. It is filled with fascinating accounts, interviews, archival research, never-before-seen documents, maps, sketches, and photographs. He convincingly shows how the heart of Kuala Lumpur began in Medan Pasar, and, over the years, its arteries spread outward, expanding the settlement, founded in 1857 on the highest navigable point of the Klang River, into the present-day vibrant, sprawling city of 2.1 million.

The First Occupants

Before any of that, Powell acknowledges the likely first occupants of the upper reaches of the Klang Valley. He identifies them as one of the largest and most widespread of the Orang Asli groups, the Temuan. As Proto-Malay hunter-gatherers, the Temuan drew on their knowledge of medicinal plants and forest resources. Powell suggests that 30,000 of their descendants still live in autonomous rural communities across the peninsula today. However, they left no visible evidence of their tenure on the site that would become Kuala Lumpur. The decision to include them feels like Powell correcting the record, since history tends to begin only after someone starts building things.

Born From Tin

Kuala Lumpur did not spring fully formed from colonial ambition; it crawled out of the mud at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers in 1857. Raja Abdullah Raja Jaafar, a Bugis nobleman from the Selangor royal family whose lineage Powell traces back to the Luwu kingdom of Sulawesi, sent 87 Chinese miners upriver by sampan to prospect for tin. Malaria killed all but 18 of them after the first month.

From that decimated founding cohort came a successful riverside frontier trading post, fringed by the warehouses of Hakka traders. It grew from barely 2,000 people to over 30,000 by 1900, then to 316,000 by 1957—a rate of expansion so spontaneous that the city had no formal town planning until 1921.

Colonial Infrastructure

Powell tracks the contributions of the British with candour. He cheekily describes the colonisers wanting their buildings on the west bank of the Klang River—high ground, an acceptable ‘padang’ for cricket and football, and a comfortable distance from the Chinese, Indian, and Malay sectors on the east.

Elsewhere, they tried coffee and tobacco estates first before realising rubber plantations were more profitable. For our modern, considerably less feral lifestyle, we can thank their establishment of sanitary boards in the 1890s that handled public health, street maintenance, and rubbish collection. Street lighting and drainage came next, then water and electricity by the late 1890s.

After the 1926 floods, the Gombak-Klang confluence was straightened to manage the water. That intervention, combined with increasing hard surfaces and the loss of upstream forest, foreshadowed some of the drainage challenges Kuala Lumpur still faces today.

The People Who Shaped

The book’s real strength lies in how thoroughly it expands the usual cast of colonial administrators by spotlighting figures whose legacies are etched into the city’s morphology. Familiar names spring forth: Loke Yew, Loke Chow Kit, and Thamboosamy Pillai.

Yet it was Yap Ah Loy, the third Kapitan Cina (1868–1885), who had the strongest founding influence in the early narrative of the town centre. Among his many contributions, he drove the creation of the first public square and a school, helped establish the city’s oldest Taoist temple, and supported the construction of a metalled road from Damansara to Klang (one of the first major overland alternatives to river transport)—all while drawing revenue from various traders.

Beyond these central figures, Powell gives overdue attention to other diverse migrant communities who shaped the city’s “urban palimpsest”. He highlights the South Indian Chettiar moneylenders, Tamil Muslim merchants, and Ceylon Tamils who leveraged English-language educations to ascend into the middle class and civil service within a mere half-century.

Architectural Evolution

Architecturally, Powell traces the square’s transformation from the ground up. It began as “a cluster of timber and attap shacks” ringed by vegetable and fruit gardens. Fire forced change, and the British mandated brick and clay tiles. Then came AB Hubback’s neo-classical shophouses with decorative plaster garlands in the early 1900s.

By the 1930s, AO Coltman had brought art deco flourishes to the Clock Tower and surrounding buildings—a stylistic exhale after the First World War. After independence, the square slid into modernism. Tunku Abdul Rahman put his faith in architecture as nation-building, believing it could bring together a “multi-ethnic society rooted in peaceful co-existence”.

That conviction shaped many of the civic buildings still standing today, particularly Parliament House and Angkasapuri. At the latter’s opening in 1968, then-information minister Senu Abdul Rahman described the building as a symbol of the “determination of the country to uphold truth, and freedom of thought, expression, and religion”.

Heritage at Risk

Powell has a few grievances with how we manage our heritage and raises serious questions about our ability and policies to identify and protect it. He highlights buildings and sites that are considered key parts of Klang Valley’s history but remain vacant and unappreciated—Gedung Raja Abdullah in Klang, for instance, the only remaining physical evidence connecting Raja Abdullah to Kuala Lumpur and Medan Pasar.

He extends deep regard to the growing regeneration and preservation projects around Medan Pasar at Jalan Tun HS Lee, Jalan Hang Kasturi, Jalan Petaling, Jalan Sultan, and Lebuh Ampang. Driven by entrepreneurial individuals with a similar penchant for heritage preservation, restoration, and rejuvenation, an entire chapter explores them in depth.

Ng Ping Ho, who transformed four two-storey shophouses along Jalan Tun HS Lee into Backhome hostel and his own LOKL Coffee Co, recalls trailing his grandmother through the square as a boy. “I used to follow her to Medan Pasar, where she would shop, visit the gold or fabric shops, and buy fruit from Ah Meng’s fruit stall. That stall is still in the area, and after moving a few times, it is now situated opposite my own café.” Of the city itself, he is equally direct: “KL has changed so much since then—it’s so modern now, all steel and glass, almost overwhelmingly so. I appreciate that, unlike Singapore, KL is not too clean or sterile. It’s rough around the edges, with the new juxtaposed against the old, and that lends to its charm. I just wish KL was more walkable”.

That Corner Kopitiam

Which brings the story, somewhat neatly, to now—and the building that started it all.

The ground floor of the corner building at Medan Pasar became home to Sin Seng Nam, a Hainanese kopitiam that opened in 1928. For the next 85 years, it became a popular haunt of lawyers and politicians thrashing out the city’s business over coffee and kaya toast. It was naturally ventilated from the outset, with window shutters painted an eye-catching yellow from the earliest days.

It closed in February 2013 and might easily have joined the long list of Klang Valley landmarks nobody thought to save, had the Creador Foundation’s founders not stumbled back upon it during a pandemic-era bicycle ride through the old town. They were drawn back to a square where they had spent their own formative years, particularly inside Sin Seng Nam.

A New Chapter

That ride sparked the Medan Pasar restoration. Sin Seng Nam, now reopened as the family-owned artisanal bakery KLCG, and the adjacent buildings were the foundation’s first acquisitions.

The project centred around returning social activity to the square, this time for a younger clientele. It is complemented by a private event space, an art resource centre, and Dia Space, a rotating platform for creative pop-ups and events. It set a template for what followed: purposeful restoration blending conservation with contemporary social and economic activity, ensuring the Old Market Square remains relevant for current and future generations rather than preserved purely for looks.

Soon after came the restoration of numbers 11, 12, 13, and 15 Medan Pasar, now home to the foundation’s offices, a legal practice, and F&B outlets. Contemporary use is balanced by historic preservation down to the smallest detail, from V-shaped clay roof tiles to lighting designed with the building’s heritage value in mind.

A Blueprint in Motion

On 1 November, Muara Arts Gallery is scheduled to open as a new home for Malaysian and Southeast Asian art. Named by the late Southeast Asian gallerist Valentine Willie after the Malay word for estuary, it honours the historic river confluence just behind its walls.

Set within six art deco shophouses overlooking the clock tower, the gallery facade has been restored to its original Shanghai plaster finish. Inside, museum-standard spaces will host world-class programming exploring Southeast Asian art and time-honoured craft traditions.

Far from standing still, the square is undergoing an exciting period of restoration and revitalisation, with Muara Arts marking a major milestone in its evolving urban canvas. As Powell concludes, “Medan Pasar is in a process of change. It will never be ‘finished’, but by the end of the current decade, it will be inscribed with entirely new meanings.”

The ‘Medan Pasar: the Old Market Square of Kuala Lumpur’ book is available for purchase here.

Cover image: Designed in art deco style, the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation Limited building was a precursor of modernism in Malaya. It used to house bicycle parking in the basement, an innovation in its day. Here it is dressed for Merdeka Celebrations in 1957. Naina Mohamed & Sons, far left. Mercantile Bank of India, London and China, far right.

Images: courtesy of Atelier International