Malacca City

Malacca was founded in 1396 by Parameswara, a prince from Palembang in Sumatra, who settled at the river mouth and built a port at the narrowest point of the strait. Within a few decades it controlled the trade between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea: Ming fleets under Zheng He called here, Gujarati, Arab, Javanese and Chinese merchants settled, and the rulers converted to Islam, making the city the centre from which Islam and Malay court culture spread through the archipelago. Its laws, its literature and the legends of the warrior Hang Tuah all date from this age.

Portuguese forces under Afonso de Albuquerque took the city in 1511 and built the fortress of A Famosa on the hill; the sultan's line fled south and founded Johor. The Dutch East India Company captured Malacca in 1641 after a long siege, built the Stadthuys and Christ Church, and ran it for more than a century and a half, though by then trade was already slipping away. Britain took over under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 and joined Malacca to Penang and Singapore as the Straits Settlements; most of the fortress had already been pulled down by the British in 1807, when the Porta de Santiago was spared.

The 19th and early 20th centuries were quiet ones: Singapore drew away the shipping, and Malacca lived on rubber, tin shipment and its shops. Japanese forces occupied it from 1942 to 1945. In 1957, after independence, its economy turned increasingly to tourism and manufacturing. In 2008 the old town was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the Historic Cities of the Straits of Malacca, together with George Town in Penang, and large reclamation projects have since extended the shoreline well beyond the old waterfront.

Malacca's population is Malay, Chinese and Indian, as in the rest of the country, but it also holds communities that exist almost nowhere else. The Baba-Nyonya, or Peranakan Chinese, descend from traders who settled from the 15th century onwards and married locally, adopting Malay dress, language and cooking while keeping Chinese religion and clan ties; their shophouses, beaded slippers and porcelain define the old streets. The Kristang, of Portuguese descent, live mainly in the Portuguese Settlement and still speak a Portuguese-based creole, Papia Kristang. The Chitty are Hindus of Tamil descent whose ancestors married Malay and Chinese women, with their own village and festivals.

The calendar reflects this. Chinese New Year fills Jonker Street with lanterns and lion dances; the Kristang keep Festa San Pedro in June and an elaborate Christmas; Hari Raya and Deepavali bring open houses; and processions leave the old temples for the streets on festival days. Tamil, Hokkien, Malay, English and Kristang can all be heard within a few blocks.

Craft and performance survive alongside the tourism: beadwork and Nyonya kebaya, dondang sayang, a slow sung poetic duet that began in Malacca under Portuguese musical influence, and Portuguese-descended dances at the settlement. Manners are those of a small, conservative town that receives millions of visitors, and residents of the heritage zone are used to cameras but not untroubled by them.

Malacca City has a population of around 580,000, in a state of roughly a million. Many live outside the heritage core, in Melaka Raya, Ayer Keroh, Batu Berendam and the newer housing on reclaimed land, and they come into the old town for work, worship and food rather than to live in it.

Tourism is the city's largest industry, along with manufacturing — electronics and furniture in the industrial estates around Batu Berendam and Ayer Keroh — government offices, education and small trade. The weekly rhythm is unusual: quiet from Monday to Thursday, with shops and museums half empty, then a surge from Friday evening, when coaches arrive and the night market opens. Many residents work in that weekend economy.

Rising rents in the heritage shophouses, the conversion of family homes into hotels and cafés, traffic and the effect of land reclamation on the shoreline and the old port view are constant local debates. Away from that, life is small-town: morning markets, school runs, mosque and temple, an evening meal at a hawker centre and a river that runs through the middle of it all.

Malacca's signature cooking is Nyonya, the Peranakan blend of Chinese technique and Malay spice. Ayam pongteh braises chicken with fermented soybean paste and potatoes; itek tim is a sour duck soup with salted vegetables; Nyonya laksa serves noodles in a spicy coconut gravy; and kuih — small steamed cakes in bright colours, often scented with pandan and coconut — fill the bakery windows. The Kristang contribute curry debal, a fiery "devil's curry" of leftover meats with vinegar and chillies, eaten at the Portuguese Settlement.

Two dishes belong to the city in particular. Chicken rice balls, in which the rice is pressed into small rounds and served with poached chicken, are a Malacca habit found at shops near Jonker Street. Satay celup, a local invention, sets a pot of thick peanut sauce bubbling in the middle of the table, into which diners dip skewers of meat, fish balls, vegetables and offal, paying by the stick at the end.

The city's sweet tooth runs on gula Melaka, the dark palm sugar named after it. It sweetens cendol, shaved ice with coconut milk and green rice-flour strands, and appears in kuih and desserts across Malaysia. Other local stops are the pineapple tarts sold as gifts, popiah rolls, grilled seafood at the settlement and the coconut shakes of the Klebang coast road, with kopi and teh tarik from the old coffee shops.