The sultanate that made this coast matter, then Portuguese, then Dutch, then British — and a UNESCO site you can walk in a day.
Melaka is a UNESCO World Heritage Site — jointly with George Town in Penang — and it is the single best day trip from Kuala Lumpur. It is also better as an overnight, and this page says so plainly.
Why it matters
Melaka was the reason Europeans came to this part of the world.
Founded around 1400 by Parameswara, a prince from Palembang, it grew within a century into the greatest entrepôt in Southeast Asia — the point where the monsoon winds turned, where Chinese junks met Indian and Arab traders, and where the spice route bottlenecked.
Its ruler converted to Islam, and Melaka became the vector by which Islam spread through the archipelago. The Malay language it used became the lingua franca of the region and is the ancestor of modern Malay and Indonesian.
Then:
1511 — the Portuguese took it under Afonso de Albuquerque, the first European territorial conquest in Southeast Asia. 1641 — the Dutch took it after a siege. 1824 — the British got it in a treaty swap for Bencoolen in Sumatra.
Four rulers, five centuries, all of it in one small town.
What to see
Dutch Square — the deep red Stadthuys of 1650, the oldest surviving Dutch building in the East, with Christ Church of 1753 beside it. The colour is not original; the British painted it red in the nineteenth century.
A Famosa — the Porta de Santiago, the surviving gate of the Portuguese fortress of 1511. Almost all the rest was demolished by the British in 1806, and it was reportedly Stamford Raffles who intervened to stop the gate going too.
St Paul’s Church on the hill above — a Portuguese chapel of 1521, later Dutch, now a roofless ruin with old tombstones stacked against the walls. St Francis Xavier was buried here temporarily before being moved to Goa.
Jonker Street — Jalan Hang Jebat — antiques, shophouses, cafés, and the Jonker Walk night market on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings.
Cheng Hoon Teng Temple, founded 1645, the oldest functioning Chinese temple in Malaysia.
Kampung Kling Mosque, of 1748, with a Sumatran tiered roof and a pagoda-like minaret — not a dome in sight, and a much better guide to indigenous Malay-Islamic architecture than the Moorish revival of Kuala Lumpur.
Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum — a Peranakan townhouse kept as a home.
The Peranakan
The Baba-Nyonya or Straits Chinese are the descendants of Chinese traders who settled here from the fifteenth century and married locally, producing a distinct culture: Malay language and dress, Chinese religion and family structure, and a cuisine — nyonya food — that is one of the genuine fusion cooking traditions of the world.
Try laksa, ayam pongteh, cendol and pineapple tarts. The nyonya restaurants in Melaka are the reason a lot of Malaysians come.
The honest bit
The historic core is small — you can walk it in a few hours — and at weekends it is extremely crowded.
Parts of it are heavily touristed in a way that grates: the trishaws decorated with plastic flowers and playing loud pop music are a genuine local phenomenon and are also, for many visitors, the thing they most want to escape.
The land reclamation along the waterfront has moved the sea some distance from the old town and has been criticised on heritage grounds.
None of that undoes the history. Come on a weekday, stay a night, and walk it early.
Getting there
Bus from TBS — Terminal Bersepadu Selatan, on the KTM and LRT at Bandar Tasik Selatan — to Melaka Sentral, about two hours, frequent, and very cheap. Then a local bus or Grab into the old town.
By car it is about ninety minutes on the North-South Expressway.
There is no railway to Melaka.
