Malaysia

Kampung Chitty

Tamil traders married into Malay and Chinese families five centuries ago, kept their religion and lost their language. Their creole is still spoken here, in the only village this community has anywhere.

Cheng Hoon Teng Temple

Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian altars under one roof, in continuous use since 1645, under a lacquered roof ridge assembled by craftsmen who were shipped in along with the materials.

Masjid Kampung Hulu

The country's oldest mosque still standing on its original site has no dome at all: a tiered timber roof and a minaret shaped like a pagoda, built before either convention arrived.

Sri Poyyatha Vinayagar Moorthi Temple

A single-hall temple from 1781, built by the headman of a creole Tamil community on land the Dutch gave him, and still the community's own.

Christ Church Melaka

The most photographed building in the city, and almost nobody goes inside, where the ceiling beams were each cut from a single tree and the floor is paved with tombstones.

Church of St Paul

The saint was buried here for nine months before his body went on to Goa. The grave is still open behind a grille, and it is empty.

Medan Portugis (Portuguese Square)

Dinner-only restaurants serving a vinegar-and-chilli curry built from Boxing Day leftovers and chicken cooked in its own blood, in the last neighbourhood where the creole that named those dishes is still a community language.

Masjid Tengkera (Tranquerah Mosque)

The sultan who signed Singapore over to the East India Company is buried in a suburban mosque yard, under a canopy, with nothing in English to say so.

Kedai Kopi Chung Wah

The rice is cooked in chicken stock and rolled by hand into balls while it is still hot, and you order by the number of balls, not by the plate.

Muzium Kapal Selam (Submarine Museum)

Sixty-seven metres of decommissioned submarine sitting on cradles on a beach, walked end to end through corridors nobody widened for visitors.

Wah Aik Shoemaker

Three brothers in their seventies and eighties still cut and sew three-inch shoes for bound feet by hand. The last pair for a customer who actually had bound feet was made in the 1990s.

Portuguese Settlement

On 29 June the settlement's fishing boats are decorated and blessed. Go on the 27th or 28th instead and you get the decorating, which is the better half.

Jalan Tokong / Jalan Tukang Emas / Jalan Tukang Besi

The country's oldest working Chinese temple, its oldest working Hindu temple and a 1748 mosque stand within a few doors of one another, among goldsmiths and blacksmiths who are still trading.

Capitol Satay Celup

A cauldron of thick peanut sauce is set into the table and you cook fifty kinds of raw skewer in it yourself. You are billed by the count of sticks you used.

Muzium Penjara Malaysia (Malaysia Prison Museum)

Most prison museums quietly lose their condemned block. This one kept the gallows, the death-row cells and the mortuary trolleys, and left some cells exactly as they were.

Bukit China

More than 12,500 graves terraced over three hills, some of them Ming-era, with a well from 1459 at the bottom that is said never to have run dry.

Encore Melaka

The whole 2,000-seat auditorium turns, carrying you past a 240-metre stage, and it is engineered smoothly enough that you are not supposed to notice it moving.

Padang Kemunting Turtle Management Centre

The peninsula's main hawksbill rookery is offshore and closed to visitors, so the hatchery on the mainland is where the eggs, and the evening releases, end up.

Perigi Hang Tuah (Hang Tuah's Well)

A well the national epic's warrior is said to have dug himself, gazetted as a monument in 1977, with a white crocodile in it that only the pious can see.

Kampung Kling Mosque

A Sumatran roof, a Chinese pagoda minaret, Corinthian columns, a Victorian chandelier and a pulpit carved with Hindu and Chinese motifs, in one prayer hall.

Villa Sentosa

A family opened their own stilt house as a museum and never moved out. One of them shows you the heirlooms, then hands you the gong to strike three times.

Trishaw rank, Dutch Square (Red Square)

Every rider decorates his own machine and they compete over it, so walk the rank before you pick one. The sound system can be heard four streets away.

Mamee Jonker House

Pick a soup base, choose your condiments, draw on the cup, and watch it sealed and packed for you to carry out.

Asam Pedas Claypot Restoran Kota Laksamana

A tamarind-sour, chilli-hot fish stew that comes to the table still boiling in its claypot. Order the stingray, and ask whether the tetel is on.

Muzium Istana Kesultanan Melaka (Melaka Sultanate Palace Museum)

No trace of the original survives, so they rebuilt it full-scale from the description in a sixteenth-century chronicle, using wooden pegs instead of nails.

Muzium Kecantikan (Museum of Enduring Beauty)

A whole museum about foot binding, neck rings, lip discs and skull shaping, and the argument it makes is that beauty is whatever a culture decided it was.

Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum

One family bought these three shophouses in 1861 and lived in them for four generations. They still run the tours, and the commentary is about their own rooms.

Sin Hiap Hin

Rice spirit infused with lychee and rose, poured out of old apothecary bottles in a single-room shop that has been serving drinkers since the 1920s.

Putu Piring Melaka

Rice-flour cakes steamed over cloth in stacked brass moulds, turned onto banana leaf, with a palm sugar centre that has already gone liquid by the time you get to the kerb.

Klebang Original Coconut Shake

Coconut water, shredded pandan coconut flesh, ice and vanilla ice cream, from the stall the whole national habit came from. The queue once blocked the coast road.

Jonker 88

Shaved ice, green rice-flour noodles and enough smoky palm sugar that a layer of syrup is still sitting at the bottom of the bowl when the ice is gone.

St John's Fort

The bronze cannons point inland, because the attack the garrison expected was coming from behind them, not from the sea.

Pulau Besar

The residents were moved off, a resort was built and abandoned, and worship at some shrines is signposted as prohibited. The pilgrim ferries run anyway.

8 Heeren Street Heritage Centre

A 1790s shophouse restored and then left as an exhibit about its own restoration: what was found, what was replaced, and why.

Nadeje

A Japanese resident could not find fresh-cream cake here in 2006, so she made twenty-layer crepe cakes. This is the shop she made them in.

Baba Charlie Nyonya Cake

More than thirty-five kinds of nyonya kuih, made by hand in a family house that has been selling them since 1988 and has still never opened a shop.

Jonker Cultural Stage

A nightly karaoke contest on a municipal stage, won by pensioners singing standards, with rows of aunties line-dancing in front. You can put your name down.

Melaka On Bike

Twenty kilometres of off-road village track, with a stop to cut a rubber tree and watch the latex set. The 7pm ride is the one to take in this climate.

Straits Chinese Jewellery Museum

Four hundred pieces of Peranakan jewellery shown with the goldsmiths' tools that made them, and a guide who can tell you what each piece said about the woman wearing it.

Sixty 3 Heritage

Sheer voile with cutwork embroidery down the front, closed with a three-piece brooch set rather than buttons, cut to your measurements in three days.

Cheng Ho Cultural Museum

Eight linked shophouses over three floors, standing on what is believed to be the site of the walled warehouse compound the admiral built here around 1409.

Petronas Twin Towers

The double-deck bridge joining the world's tallest twin towers, 170 metres up. It is not bolted to either tower — it slides, because they sway apart.

Batu Caves

A 400-million-year-old limestone cave turned Hindu temple, reached by 272 painted steps, with the tallest statue of Murugan anywhere standing at the foot of them.

Kampung Baru

A village of wooden houses two kilometres from the Petronas Towers, still standing because of a land status invented for it in 1900 and held by nowhere else in the world.

KL Forest Eco Park

Genuine lowland rainforest in the middle of the capital, gazetted in 1906 and nibbled down from 17.5 hectares to about nine. Cicadas and macaques, with eight lanes of traffic audible underneath.

Kampung Kuantan Firefly Park

Hundreds of thousands of fireflies on mangrove trees along the Selangor River, flashing three times a second and gradually synchronising into one pulse. Rowed, in silence, in the dark.

Royal Selangor Visitor Centre

Their 1985 centenary tankard stands almost two metres tall and weighs over a tonne. The reason to go is the workshop next to it, where you beat your own pewter dish with traditional tools and take it home.

BookXcess Rex KL

A 1940s cinema gutted by fire twice and left abandoned, now a maze of floor-to-ceiling shelves holding 80,000 books, with the ruin deliberately left visible.

Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia

Over seven thousand objects across fourteen centuries, in a building whose domes were tiled by Iranian artisans brought in for the job.

Sri Mahamariamman Temple

A chariot built from 350 kilograms of silver, kept in Kuala Lumpur's oldest Hindu temple, and pulled seven kilometres through the city on Thaipusam eve ahead of a quarter of a million people.

Masjid Jamek

Kuala Lumpur translates as muddy confluence. This is the confluence — two rivers meeting under a 1909 mosque, on the ground where the city was founded.

SkyCity Tower i-City

Six hundred metres of transparent tube spiralling down from a tower built for no other purpose, ridden in an inflatable raft. It is lit from inside after dark.