Muddy waters

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a tin miner.

Not just any tin miner, but one of 87 Chinese prospectors invited in 1857 by nephews of the Malay sultan of Selenagor to investigate the tin ore deposits up the Klang valley.

So off you go, alighting with your buddies at the muddy confluence of the Gombok and Klang rivers, heading upstream and dreaming of enormous riches.

The good news is that enough tin would be found around Ampong to encourage more tin miners to come and have a go. The bad news is that the area was infested with mosquitoes and only 18 of the original party will survive the malaria.

And you’re not one of them.

Suppose they bring you back to the shacks at that little staging post at the muddy confluence to breathe your last, disease-riddled breaths. I imagine that your last feverish nightmares might be about home in China, the loved ones you’ll never see again, the family left penniless.

Maybe your dying fever would be about your surroundings at that bleak staging post.

But even so, would you have imagined in your maddest, wildest, last delirium that in a hundred and fifty years time, the disease-ridden, muddy (Malay : “lumpar”) confluence (“kuala”) would look like this?

Or this?

Or this?

Selamat datang to KL!