Timeline of Kuala Lumpur

Eighty-seven men at the confluence. Raja Abdullah of Klang sends 87 Chinese miners upriver to prospect for tin. They land where the Gombak meets the Klang — the muddy confluence — and walk inland to Ampang. Sixty-nine of them are dead of malaria within a month.

Tin at Ampang. The survivors strike ore. A supply settlement grows at the landing point to serve the mines, and it is the beginning of the city.

Yap Ah Loy. A Hakka immigrant who arrived in Malaya at seventeen becomes Kapitan Cina of Kuala Lumpur at thirty. He holds the town, runs the mines, and effectively builds the place. The temple he founded still stands in Chinatown.

The Selangor Civil War. Three years of fighting over the tin revenues between rival Malay chiefs allied with rival Chinese secret societies. Kuala Lumpur is captured, burned and recaptured. Yap Ah Loy rebuilds it largely at his own expense.

A Resident arrives. The Pangkor Treaty installs a British Resident in Selangor — formally an adviser to the Sultan, in practice the government. Frank Swettenham is the one who matters for Kuala Lumpur.

Capital of Selangor. The state capital moves from Klang to Kuala Lumpur, which by now has a few thousand people, almost all of them working in or supplying the tin trade.

Fire, flood, and brick. A fire destroys the wooden town and a flood follows within months. Swettenham orders that Kuala Lumpur be rebuilt in brick and tile. The clay pits that supply it are why Brickfields has that name.

The railway to Klang. The line to the port opens, and tin can leave without the river. Kuala Lumpur becomes a railway town as well as a mining one, and the Tamil labour recruited to build and run it settles in Brickfields.

Federal capital. The Federated Malay States are constituted with Kuala Lumpur as their capital — a town of about twenty thousand, forty years old, now running four Malay states on behalf of the British.

The striped offices. The Sultan Abdul Samad Building is completed on the edge of the cricket padang: banded brick, horseshoe arches and copper domes, in a Moorish revival borrowed from Mughal India by British architects. Nothing about it is Malay, and it is now the most recognisable building in the country.

Masjid Jamek. A. B. Hubback’s mosque opens on the spit between the two rivers, on the exact ground where the city started. It is the principal mosque of Kuala Lumpur until 1965.

A station like a palace. Kuala Lumpur Railway Station opens — minarets, chattris and keyhole arches — and serves as the main terminus for eighty-one years.

Rubber. The Stevenson restriction scheme regulates output across British Malaya, by then supplying about half the world’s natural rubber. Tin built the city; rubber built the country, and both were worked by labour recruited in enormous numbers from China and South India.

The Depression. Tin and rubber prices collapse. Thousands of Chinese and Indian labourers are repatriated, and the plural society the colonial economy created is exposed as something nobody had planned for and nobody governed.

A hundred and fifty thousand. Kuala Lumpur’s population, eighty-two years after eighty-seven men landed at the confluence. Malays are close to a minority in Malaya as a whole.

The Japanese arrive on bicycles. Kuala Lumpur falls on 11 January, having been reached down the peninsula faster than the British believed possible. The occupation lasts until 1945 and is severe, particularly for the Chinese community. It also ends the assumption of British competence permanently.

Liberation, and a bombed museum. The Japanese surrender. Among the casualties of the Allied air raids on the railway yards is the Selangor Museum, whose replacement becomes the National Museum in 1963.

UMNO. The British propose a Malayan Union stripping the sultans of authority and granting broad citizenship. Malay opposition is immediate and organised, and the United Malays National Organisation is founded. It governs the country continuously from 1957 to 2018.

The Emergency. A communist insurgency begins and lasts twelve years. Around half a million rural Chinese are resettled into guarded ‘New Villages’. It is never officially called a war, because the planters’ insurance covered civil disturbance and not war.

Merdeka. At midnight on 30 August the Union Jack comes down over the padang; at dawn the Federation flag goes up. Later that morning at Stadium Merdeka, Tunku Abdul Rahman leads the crowd in seven shouts of Merdeka!

The Emergency ends. Formally declared over after twelve years. The National Monument in the Lake Gardens, by the sculptor who made the Iwo Jima memorial, commemorates the dead.

Malaysia. The Federation of Malaya joins with Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak to form Malaysia, over the objections of Indonesia, which fights an undeclared war — Konfrontasi — against it until 1966.

Singapore leaves. After two years of deteriorating relations over the terms of the union and the politics of race, Singapore is expelled from Malaysia. Lee Kuan Yew announces it in tears on television.

13 May. Communal rioting breaks out in Kuala Lumpur after an election in which the ruling coalition loses ground. The official death toll is 196 and other estimates are higher; most of the dead are Chinese. Parliament is suspended for nearly two years.

The New Economic Policy. A programme of affirmative action to raise the Bumiputera share of national wealth, through quotas in education, employment and share ownership. It substantially achieves its economic aims, becomes permanent, and remains the central fault line of Malaysian politics.

A Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur is separated from Selangor and governed directly by the federal government, which is why the city has no state and why Selangor’s capital moved to Shah Alam.

Vision 2020. Mahathir Mohamad sets out a programme for Malaysia to become a developed nation within thirty years. The building that follows — the towers, the airport, the new capital — is that programme made physical.

KL Tower. Menara Kuala Lumpur is completed at 421 metres on Bukit Nanas, with a preserved patch of primary rainforest at its foot and a single jelutong tree that construction was rerouted around.

The tallest in the world, in the worst year. The Petronas Twin Towers are completed at 451.9 metres, along with KLIA and the Commonwealth Games — in the middle of the Asian financial crisis, which hits Malaysia hard and prompts capital controls that the IMF advised against and that largely worked.

The government moves out. The federal administration relocates to Putrajaya, a capital built from nothing on a rubber plantation, while parliament and the palace stay in Kuala Lumpur.

The MRT. The first mass rapid transit line opens, followed by the second from 2022. It is the largest single improvement to how the city works since independence, and the stations are air-conditioned, which in this climate is not a small thing.

A government changes. For the first time since 1957, the governing coalition loses a general election. The years that follow are politically turbulent, with several changes of prime minister.

The Movement Control Order. Malaysia locks down in March and Kuala Lumpur empties. The economic effect on the hawker trade, the hotels and the migrant workforce is severe and takes years to unwind.

Second tallest in the world. Merdeka 118 opens its observation deck at 678.9 metres, standing over the stadium where independence was declared — the tallest building on earth after the Burj Khalifa, in a city that did not exist in 1856.