Kuala Lumpur came into being in the late 1860s when a band of prospectors in search of tin landed at the meeting point of the Klang and Gombak rivers and imaginatively named the place Kuala Lumpur means 'Muddy Convergence'. More than half of those first arrivals died of malaria and other tropical diseases, but the tin they discovered in Ampang attracted more miners and KL quickly became a noisy, brawling, violent boom town.
As in other parts of Malaysia, the local sultan appointed a 'Kapitan China' to bring the unruly Chinese fortune-seekers and their secret societies into line- a problem that Yap Ah Loy jumped at with such ruthless relish that he became known as the founder of KL.
In the 1880s successful miners and merchants began to build fine homes along Jalan Ampang. British Resident Frank Swettenham pushed through a far-reaching new town-plan, which transferred the central government here from Klang.
In the 1881 the entire town was destroyed by fire and a subsequent flood, but it quickly got back on its feet: By 1886 a railway line linked KL to Klang; by 1887 several thousand brick buildings had been built; and in 1896 the city became the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
KL has never looked back. After occupation by Japanese forces during WW II (during which many Chinese were tortured and killed and many Indians sent to work on Burma's 'Death Railway'), the British temporarily returned, only to be ousted when Malaysia finally declared its independence here in 1957 in Dataran Merdeka (Freedom Square). The city officially became the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur when it was ceded by the sultan of Selangor state in 1974.
Today KL is not only Malaysia's political and commercial capital but also its most populous and prosperous city.
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