Who ruled Kuala Lumpur?

Kuala Lumpur lies in the Klang Valley on the west side of the Malay Peninsula, where the Gombak River joins the Klang about 40 kilometres inland from the Strait of Malacca. Its name means "muddy confluence". It is a young city by the standards of Asian capitals: it began in the 1850s as a rough camp serving tin mines, and almost everything about its early growth, from its Chinese merchant elite to its railway and its role as a colonial capital, came from the world's demand for tin and then rubber.

The peninsula had a long history of trading states, but none was centred on this valley. In the first millennium CE the coast lay within the trading sphere of Indianised kingdoms and later of Srivijaya, the Sumatran maritime power. From about 1400 the Sultanate of Malacca dominated the region and spread Islam along the coasts, until the Portuguese seized Malacca in 1511. The Klang Valley itself was thinly settled forest and swamp, home to Orang Asli groups and small Malay villages along the rivers. In the 18th century the Sultanate of Selangor was founded by Bugis settlers, and its chiefs drew revenue from tin mined in the interior.

Around 1857 a Selangor prince, Raja Abdullah, financed Chinese miners to open tin workings upriver at Ampang. Many died of fever, but the mines succeeded, and traders set up shops at the confluence, the highest point that supply boats could reach. The settlement was run largely by Chinese headmen with the title Kapitan Cina. The most famous of them, Yap Ah Loy, held the town together through the Selangor Civil War of 1867 to 1874, a struggle among Malay princes and rival Chinese secret societies for control of the tin revenues. Kuala Lumpur was burned in 1872 and recaptured the next year, and Yap rebuilt it.

In 1874 Selangor accepted a British Resident, and in 1880 the British moved the state capital from Klang to Kuala Lumpur. The town was still a cluster of wooden and thatched buildings prone to fire, flood and cholera; after a fire destroyed it in 1881, the Resident Frank Swettenham ordered rebuilding in brick and tile, giving rise to the shophouse streets of the old centre. A railway to Klang opened in 1886, and in 1896 Kuala Lumpur became the capital of the new Federated Malay States, a group of protectorates within the British Empire. Rubber planting brought another boom in the early 1900s, and immigrants from China and India, along with Malays from across the archipelago, gave the city its mixed population.

Troops of the Empire of Japan occupied the city from January 1942 to August 1945, during which thousands of Chinese residents were killed. After the war the British faced a communist insurgency, the Malayan Emergency, and resettled many rural Chinese in "New Villages" on the city's edge. On 31 August 1957 the Federation of Malaya became independent, with Kuala Lumpur as its capital, and in 1963 it became the capital of the new federation of Malaysia. Ethnic riots on 13 May 1969 killed at least 196 people in the city, by official count, and led to policies favouring the Malay majority. In 1974 Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor as a federal territory.

Revenue from oil, manufacturing and finance paid for a building boom, symbolised by the Petronas Twin Towers, the world's tallest buildings when completed in 1998. Many government offices have since moved to the planned city of Putrajaya, but Kuala Lumpur remains the national capital, with about two million people in the federal territory and roughly eight million in the Klang Valley conurbation.