Kuala Lumpur

Kuala Lumpur means "muddy confluence"—named for the point where the Klang and Gombak rivers meet in a swampy valley that killed most of the original Chinese tin miners who arrived in 1857. Of the 87 men in the first expedition, 69 died of malaria. The survivors found tin.

Tin built the city; rubber expanded it; palm oil enriched it; Petronas oil money transformed it. Each commodity wave deposited a new economic layer without fully replacing the last. The Petronas Twin Towers (1998)—the world's tallest buildings for six years—were explicitly designed as a national symbol: Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad commissioned them to announce Malaysia's arrival as a modern economy. The towers' floor plan is based on an eight-pointed Islamic star, geometry serving ideology.

KL's ethnic arithmetic shapes everything. Roughly 44% Malay, 36% Chinese, and 10% Indian at the city level, the population operates under the New Economic Policy (NEP) and its successors—affirmative action for Bumiputera (ethnic Malays and indigenous peoples) that reserves university places, government contracts, and corporate equity stakes. The policy reduced poverty dramatically but created a dual economy: government-linked companies (GLCs) dominated by Malay managers and Chinese-owned SMEs that generate most private-sector dynamism.

Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), launched in 1996, attempted to create a Malaysian Silicon Valley in Cyberjaya, south of KL. The results were mixed—Cyberjaya attracted back offices and data centers but not the innovation ecosystem Mahathir envisioned. The real tech economy grew inside KL itself, around Bangsar South and the city center.

KL's per capita GDP runs roughly three times the national average, creating a gravitational pull that drains talent from every Malaysian state. The city is Malaysia's economy, for better and worse.