Muar

Muar's importance is older than the town. The Muar River, the third longest in Peninsular Malaysia, was a route inland and a landing place on the strait, and the area appears in the traditions of the Malacca sultanate — Sultan Mahmud Shah withdrew here after the Portuguese conquest of 1511 and raised a fort at the mouth of the Bentayan River before retreating further inland to Pagoh — and the mountain inland, Gunung Ledang, carries one of the best-known legends of Malay literature. A trading settlement existed at the river mouth long before any planned town.

The modern township was inaugurated on 12 August 1887 by Maharaja Abu Bakar, who bestowed the name Bandar Maharani, the town of the empress, in honour of his consort Maharani Fatimah, and laid it out on a grid — a deliberate piece of planning in the same reforming spirit that produced Johor Bahru and the state constitution. Chinese merchants, many of them Hainanese and Hokkien, took the shophouse lots; government offices, a courthouse, a customs house and a rest house went up along the riverfront, and the mosque that carries Sultan Ibrahim's name was completed in 1930.

Muar prospered on river trade, rubber, coconut and later timber and furniture making, and for much of the 20th century it was one of the larger towns of Johor. It was the scene of heavy fighting in January 1942 as Japanese forces pushed down the west coast. The expressway built inland in the 1990s took through-traffic away, and the town settled into a quieter role, although in 2012 the sultan declared Muar the royal town of Johor, and restoration work on the old commercial streets has followed.

Muar's culture is built on its two long-settled communities. The Malay side is the Johor mainstream — the sultanate, the mosque, kampung life along the river and the coast, and a dialect close to that spoken across the state — sharpened by the town's royal status, which brings official ceremonies and a visible respect for the Johor court. The Chinese side is unusually Hainanese in character, and Hainanese families run many of the coffee shops, bakeries and old trading firms, with clan associations still occupying buildings in the old grid.

The town has an outsized reputation in two fields. One is food, taken very seriously indeed: people drive from Malacca, Johor Bahru and Singapore for a morning of satay and otak-otak. The other is music and dance: Muar is widely hailed as the birthplace of the Johor ghazal tradition and of several zapin dances, among them Zapin Muar and Zapin Lenga, while keroncong remains popular among Malay families of Javanese descent in the district.

Daily manners are those of small-town Malaysia: modest dress, shoes left at the door, the right hand used for eating and giving, and a slower pace than the cities. Conversation moves between Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien, Hainanese and English. The riverfront in the evening is the town's shared space, where families walk, fish and sit on the wall as the sun goes down over the strait.

Muar District held an estimated 239,000 people in 2010, divided between the town itself and coastal villages, oil palm and rubber smallholdings and small settlements along the river. The population is mixed: about 56 per cent Bumiputera, mostly Malay, roughly 36 per cent of Chinese descent and a small Indian Malaysian community.

Furniture is the signature industry: the town is known as the hub of Malaysia's furniture industry, and the showrooms and workshops along the roads inland are a striking feature of the place. Alongside that are food processing, rubber and oil palm, fishing at Parit Jawa and the other coastal villages, textile trade at Tangkak, and government offices. Pagoh's university and college campuses have brought students to the district.

Days begin very early — satay and noodles are eaten at breakfast, the market is busiest before eight, and the coffee shops fill with retired men reading newspapers. The middle of the day is hot and slow, the riverfront revives in the late afternoon, and the old town is largely shut by mid-evening. The long-standing local issues are the same as in many Malaysian towns of this size: young people leaving for Kuala Lumpur, Johor Bahru or Singapore, the cost of living for those who stay, and flooding when the river rises after heavy rain.

Muar's name means otak-otak to most Malaysians: fish paste blended with coconut milk, chilli, turmeric and herbs, wrapped here in attap, or nipa palm, leaf and grilled over charcoal until the parcel chars at the edges. It is sold by the packet from shops and stalls, eaten as a snack, with rice or with bread, and taken away by the boxload by visitors. Mee bandung Muar is the town's other claim: yellow noodles in a thick, dark gravy of dried shrimp, chilli and spices, topped with a poached egg and beef or prawns.

Satay in Muar is a breakfast, which surprises visitors from elsewhere. Skewers of beef or chicken grilled over coals arrive with a thick peanut sauce, cubes of ketupat rice cake, cucumber and raw onion, and are eaten in coffee shops from early morning alongside kopi. Those Hainanese coffee shops supply the other staples of a Muar morning: kaya toast, soft-boiled eggs with soy sauce and white pepper, and coffee brewed through a cloth sock.

Down on the coast at Parit Jawa the dish is asam pedas — fish, often stingray, simmered in a sour tamarind and chilli gravy with okra and torch ginger — eaten with rice at restaurants looking out over the mudflats. Add to that the Johor standards of mee rebus and laksa Johor, the Malay kuih sold at the market in the morning, and the fruit of the inland orchards, and the town's reputation for eating well is easy to understand.