Kuala Selangor

The mouth of the Selangor river was the seat of power in the state long before Kuala Lumpur existed. The Selangor sultanate, founded in 1766 by a Bugis line from Sulawesi, fortified the hill at Bukit Melawati above the river mouth, from where it could control the trade coming down from the tin country inland. The Dutch, who were fighting Selangor over the tin trade with Malacca, stormed the fort in 1784 and renamed it Fort Altingburg after Willem Arnold Alting, governor-general of the Dutch East Indies; Sultan Ibrahim Shah recaptured it in 1785, though the name stuck to the lighthouse the Dutch built on the summit in 1794.

Kuala Selangor remained a royal centre through the 19th century, and its rulers and their families are buried in the graves on the hill. The Selangor Civil War of the 1860s and 1870s, fought over tin revenues among chiefs and their Chinese allies, drew in British forces and ended with the sultan accepting a British Resident in 1874. Power then moved inland and upriver: the state capital shifted to Kuala Lumpur in 1880 and later to Shah Alam, and the coastal town was left to fishing, rice and rubber.

Chinese settlers established the fishing village of Pasir Penambang on the north bank, and Malay villages spread upriver at Kampung Kuantan and beyond. The firefly colonies on the river, long known locally, were later developed as an attraction and are now the town's best-known draw, along with the nature park created in the mangroves at the foot of the hill.

The town divides along the river. The south bank is Malay and Muslim, with kampung houses, mosques and the royal associations of the hill; the north bank at Pasir Penambang is Chinese, built on stilts over the mud, with temples, dried-seafood shops and the seafood restaurants that fill at weekends. Indian families and estate communities live in the wider district. Each community keeps its own festivals, and open houses at Hari Raya and Chinese New Year are the moments they mix.

The royal past is still felt. The graves of Selangor sultans on Bukit Melawati are treated as a sacred site rather than a viewpoint, and visitors are expected to dress and behave accordingly. The old fort, the cannon and the lighthouse give the town a historical identity out of proportion to its size, and local guides are practised at telling the Dutch siege story.

Wildlife has become part of local culture too. The silvered leaf monkeys on the hill, with their bright orange infants, are a fixture of any visit; the nature park draws birdwatchers in the northern winter when migratory waders arrive on the mudflats; and the firefly boatmen, many of them from families that have worked the river for generations, row rather than motor in the viewing stretch to keep the noise down. Conservation of the mangroves, on which the fireflies depend, is a recurring local issue.

Kuala Selangor is the largest town and the administrative centre of a district that spreads through fishing villages, rice country and oil-palm estates on the coastal plain. Most people live in single-storey houses and shophouses rather than flats, and the pace is slow compared with the Klang Valley an hour away.

Fishing, aquaculture, rice, oil palm and fruit farming underpin the local economy, with government offices, schools and small businesses in the town and tourism providing seasonal income through boat trips, restaurants and homestays. Many working-age residents commute to Klang, Shah Alam or Kuala Lumpur, or have moved there.

The day begins before dawn at the fish jetties and the market, quietens in the heat, and comes alive again in the evening, when the seafood restaurants fill and boats prepare for the firefly runs. Weekends bring cars from the capital. Local concerns are the state of the mangroves, river pollution, erosion on the coast and the balance between tourism and the fireflies it comes to see.

Seafood defines the town's cooking, most of it eaten at Pasir Penambang, where restaurants over the water serve crab in chilli or salted-egg sauce, prawns fried with butter, steamed fish with ginger and soy, clams in spicy gravy and squid with sambal. Dried and salted products — prawn crackers, salted fish, shrimp paste and salted duck eggs — are sold from the same street and taken home by the boxful.

The district's own dish is mee udang, fresh river or sea prawns served in a noodle soup with a sweet-sour prawn broth, eaten at roadside stalls and coffee shops along the coast road. Malay kitchens grill the day's catch as ikan bakar with sambal belacan and ulam, and cook masak lemak, curries in coconut gravy, with fish and cassava shoots.

The town's other reliable pleasures are simple: breakfast noodles and kaya toast with kopi in the kopitiam, nasi lemak wrapped in banana leaf from a morning stall, rice with a choice of curries at lunch, and cendol or ais kacang in the heat. Local fruit — mangosteen, rambutan, durian and coconut — is sold from roadside stands in season, and the rice country to the north supplies much of what is eaten on the plate.