The field where the Union Jack came down in 1957, and the striped clock tower that watched it happen.
This green rectangle was the Selangor Club padang — a cricket ground, laid out for the British administration in the 1880s, on which colonial Kuala Lumpur played and watched cricket for seventy years.
At midnight on 30 August 1957, the Union Jack was lowered here for the last time. At dawn on 31 August, the flag of the Federation of Malaya was raised in its place.
The square was renamed Dataran Merdeka — Independence Square — and the flagpole at the southern end, at 95 metres, was among the tallest in the world when it was put up in 1987.
The formal declaration itself, with Tunku Abdul Rahman leading the crowd in seven shouts of “Merdeka!”, was made at Stadium Merdeka later that morning.
The Sultan Abdul Samad Building
The long building on the eastern side, with the 41-metre clock tower and the copper onion domes, was completed in 1897 as the offices of the British colonial administration of the Federated Malay States.
It was designed by A. C. Norman with A. B. Hubback, in the style variously called Moorish revival or Indo-Saracenic — horseshoe arches, banded brickwork, domes.
The choice is worth noticing. The architects were British, working in Malaya, and they reached for a vocabulary borrowed from Mughal India and North Africa on the reasoning that it was appropriately “oriental” for a Muslim territory. Nothing about it is Malay. It is a colonial idea of what a colony should look like, and it is now the most recognisable building in Kuala Lumpur and appears on the money.
The clock struck for the first time in 1897 and has kept going through occupation and independence.
Around the square
The Royal Selangor Club on the western side — mock-Tudor, black and white, founded 1884, and known universally as the Spotted Dog, for reasons nobody has ever satisfactorily explained. It was the social centre of British Kuala Lumpur and it is still a private club.
St Mary’s Anglican Cathedral, 1894, at the northern end.
The National Textile Museum, the Old High Court and the city library, all in the same striped idiom.
Sultan Abdul Samad himself was the Sultan of Selangor at the time; the building was renamed for him in 1974.
What happens here
Merdeka Day on 31 August — the national parade.
Malaysia Day on 16 September, marking the 1963 formation of Malaysia.
New Year’s Eve, and a long list of national events.
For much of the rest of the year it is a lawn with a very tall flagpole, and it is closed to walking on the grass.
Practical
Free and permanently open.
There is a KL City Gallery on the southern side with a large scale model of the city and the “I ❤ KL” sign everyone photographs. It is small and touristic and the model is genuinely useful for getting your bearings.
The river confluence that gave Kuala Lumpur its name is five minutes east.
More History
Masjid Jamek and the Confluence
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 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.