The muddy confluence the city is named after, with the oldest mosque in Kuala Lumpur standing on the spit between the two rivers.
Kuala Lumpur means muddy confluence, and this is it: the point where the Gombak river runs into the Klang.
In 1857, Raja Abdullah of Klang sent 87 Chinese miners upriver to prospect for tin. They landed at this confluence because it was as far as the boats could go, and walked from here to the tin fields at Ampang.
Within a month, 69 of the 87 were dead of malaria.
The survivors found tin. A settlement grew at the landing point to supply the mines, and that settlement is the city you are standing in.
Masjid Jamek
The mosque on the spit between the two rivers was completed in 1909 and was the principal mosque of Kuala Lumpur until Masjid Negara opened in 1965.
It was designed by A. B. Hubback — the same architect as the railway station and the textile museum — in the same Moorish revival: pink and white banded brick, onion domes, three-tiered minarets, arched colonnades.
It was built on the site of an old Malay burial ground, and it is still a working mosque with a substantial congregation.
Visitors are welcome outside prayer times. Robes are provided, shoes come off, and there is no charge. Fridays around midday are closed to visitors.
The confluence itself
Be prepared: it is not much to look at in daylight. Two brown rivers meeting between concrete embankments, under a road bridge, in a city that treated both of them as drains for a century.
That is the honest description, and it is also why the River of Life project exists.
River of Life
A government programme begun in 2011 to clean the Klang and Gombak, rebuild the riverbanks as public space, and light the confluence.
The results are mixed and locally debated. The riverside walk — landscaped promenades, bridges and the Blue Pool fountain at the confluence — is a genuine improvement and is pleasant in the evening. The water quality has improved from very bad to bad, and the target grades have been missed repeatedly.
What it does deliver is the evening lighting: the mosque floodlit, the fountains and mist at the meeting of the rivers, and coloured light on the water. It is a real spectacle and it is free.
Around it
Merdeka Square is five minutes west, Central Market and Chinatown ten minutes south.
Medan Pasar, the old market square just east, has a 1937 art deco clock tower and a run of shophouses, and was the commercial heart of early Kuala Lumpur.
LRT Masjid Jamek is one of the busiest interchanges in the city and its exit is at the mosque wall — so this is somewhere you will pass through repeatedly whether you plan to or not.
More History
Sultan Abdul Samad and Merdeka Square
The field where the Union Jack came down in 1957, and the striped clock tower that watched it happen.
Kuala Lumpur Railway Station
A 1910 station of minarets and horseshoe arches, built to a British specification requiring a roof that could carry a metre of snow.