George Town

George Town dates precisely to 1786, when Francis Light of the East India Company took possession of Penang island from the Sultan of Kedah and founded a settlement at its north-eastern point, naming it after the British king. Light declared it a free port, and that single decision shaped everything after: traders from southern China, the Coromandel coast, Aceh, Java, Arabia and Armenia settled within a few streets of one another, and the town grew far faster than its size warranted. In 1826 it joined Malacca and Singapore in the Straits Settlements, which it briefly led before Singapore's rise pushed it into second place.

The 19th century built the town that survives. Chinese clan associations, or kongsi, raised elaborate halls; secret societies fought open street battles in 1867; merchants who made fortunes in tin, rubber and shipping put up shophouses, godowns and courtyard mansions, and the stilt jetties over the water at Weld Quay were settled by clans who worked the port. Japanese forces occupied the island from 1941 to 1945, and the town was bombed by Allied aircraft.

Penang lost its free-port status in 1969, and George Town declined; rent control kept the old shophouses cheap and, unintentionally, kept them standing. When control ended in 2001 many emptied, but the UNESCO World Heritage inscription of 2008, shared with Malacca, reversed the direction: the shophouses were restored as hotels, cafés and galleries, a mural trail drew visitors from 2012, and the city's problem became the cost and crowding that came with success.

George Town is a Chinese-majority city in a Malay country, with an old Indian quarter and a small Eurasian community, and it wears the mixture openly — a mosque, a Hindu temple, a Chinese temple and an Anglican church stand within a few hundred metres on and around Jalan Masjid Kapitan Keling, a stretch often called the Street of Harmony. Clan associations still own halls and run ancestral rites, and the Peranakan or Straits Chinese families, descended from early Chinese traders who married locally, kept their own cooking, beadwork and embroidered kebaya.

The city's street language is Penang Hokkien, a dialect thick with Malay and English loanwords that outsiders from elsewhere in Malaysia find hard to follow. Festivals are public rather than private: processions at Thaipusam, opera stages and paper offerings during the seventh lunar month, lion dances at Chinese New Year, and open houses at Hari Raya and Deepavali when neighbours are fed regardless of faith.

Since the heritage listing, the town has also become an arts city. The George Town Festival programmes work in shophouses and clan halls each year, the murals and wrought-iron caricatures on the old walls have become part of the streetscape, and a steady argument runs through local life about how much change the core can absorb before the trades, the residents and the ordinary shops that earned the listing are priced out of it.

About 794,000 people live in George Town, whose boundaries have covered the whole of Penang Island since 2015, and Penang state has about 1.75 million. The city proper spreads from the old grid into suburbs of terraced housing and condominium towers along the coast, with the heritage core now holding far fewer residents than it did a generation ago. Housing costs, traffic on the bridges and reclamation projects along the shore are the standing local arguments.

The economy has two engines. The Bayan Lepas free industrial zone in the island's south has made and tested semiconductors and electronics for international firms since the 1970s, giving Penang one of Malaysia's highest incomes and drawing engineers from across the country; tourism, private hospitals treating patients from Indonesia, and the port and shipping trade make up much of the rest.

The day begins early. Coffee shops fill from about seven with kopi, kaya toast and noodles; offices and factories run on a standard working week with Friday prayers carved out of the middle of the day; and the evening belongs to the hawker centres and the seafront at Gurney Drive, which fills with walkers once the heat drops. Many stalls close one day a week and half the old town shuts for several days at Chinese New Year.

Penang's reputation rests on hawker food, and George Town is where most of it is eaten. Assam laksa, the local signature, is thick rice noodles in a sour broth of poached mackerel and tamarind, finished with shredded mint, pineapple, chilli and a spoonful of hae ko, black prawn paste. Char kway teow is flat rice noodles fried over fierce heat with prawns, cockles, chives and egg. Penang Hokkien mee is a prawn-stock soup, orange with chilli oil; koay teow th'ng is its clear-broth opposite. Nasi kandar, rice under a pour of several curries, grew from the Indian Muslim traders who once carried it on a shoulder pole, and is sold around the clock.

Nyonya cooking, the Peranakan kitchen of Chinese ingredients and Malay spicing, gives otak-otak, jiu hu char and kerabu salads, and Penang's version tends sourer and more herbal than Malacca's. Street snacks run from rojak, fruit and fritters in a dark prawn-paste dressing, to lor bak, five-spice pork rolls, and apom balik, a folded peanut pancake. Little India adds banana-leaf rice, dosa and biryani.

Drinks and sweets are their own category: kopi brewed strong and sweetened with condensed milk, teh tarik pulled between two jugs to froth it, fresh sugarcane juice, and cendol — shaved ice, coconut milk, palm sugar and green pandan noodles — sold from carts in the old streets. Nyonya kuih, small steamed cakes of rice flour, coconut and palm sugar, are bought in the morning markets.