 Christ Church / Trishaw rider, Melaka |
 by Philip Game
"Where's that Red Square?" gabbled the package tourist, realising that the coach had moved off without her.
I knew where she meant. Moscow was light years away from Malaysia, but a rich lateritic red is the overwhelming impression created by Malacca's Town Square. Dutch colonists constructed a massive brick red town hall here in the seventeenth century and a century later complemented their Stadthuys with the equally fiery Christ Church.
A relative backwater today, Malacca formed the crucible for much of the recorded history of this multiracial nation. In the city called the heart of Malaysia, the nation’s independence was declared in 1957.
Once the capital of a mighty empire, Malacca (Melaka), the riverine trading port founded centuries ago by a Sumatran prince has absorbed the incursions of Portuguese, Dutch and British invaders and nurtured such distinctive cultural blends as the Straits Chinese Babas and Nyonyas.
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