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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
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* Los Angeles, California, United States
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* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
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* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
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*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | What does the name "Kuala Lumpur" mean? | muddy confluence, "muddy estuary," and "muddy city" | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | What does the name "Kuala Lumpur" mean? | null | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
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* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
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* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
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*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
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* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
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* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
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*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | How long was Kuala Lumpur occupied by the Japanese? | 42 months | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
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* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
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* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
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* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
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* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
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* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
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* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | When were the colonial buildings in Kuala Lumpur constructed? | toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
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* Los Angeles, California, United States
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* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | When were the colonial buildings in Kuala Lumpur constructed? | null | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | Is it a host city for the Formula One World Championship? | Yes | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | Is it a host city for the Formula One World Championship? | null | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
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* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
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* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | is the central market located in the proximity of the pertama complex? | No | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
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* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
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*2005 Malaysian haze
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* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | is the central market located in the proximity of the pertama complex? | null | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
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* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | is it home to the parliament of malaysia? | Yes | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
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* Los Angeles, California, United States
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* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | is it home to the parliament of malaysia? | null | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | when did kuala lumpur become a federal territory of malaysia? | February 1, 1974 | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | when did kuala lumpur become a federal territory of malaysia? | null | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
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Kuala_Lumpur | What is the city's population? | 1.6 million | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
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* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | What is the city's population? | null | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | Is there a more industrialized region in malaysia? | No | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
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* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
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*2005 Malaysian haze
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* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | Is there a more industrialized region in malaysia? | null | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
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* Los Angeles, California, United States
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* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
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* Los Angeles, California, United States
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* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
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* Shiraz, Iran
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
*
* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | after the 2008 elections, what party had the most parliament seats? | null | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala_Lumpur | what is the name of the event that draws the worlds top riders to malaysia? | KL Grand Prix CSI 5* | data/set3/a3 | Kuala_Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
* Sydney, Australia
* Auckland, New Zealand
* San Francisco, California, United States
* Los Angeles, California, United States
* New York City, New York, United States
* London, United Kingdom
* Dubai, United Arab Emirates
* Mashhad, Iran (October 2006)
* Esfahan, Iran
* Shiraz, Iran
* Casablanca, Morocco
* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
* Beijing, China
* Osaka, Japan
* Ankara, Turkey
* Delhi, India Delhi to London, itâs a sister act The Times of India. Retrieved on August 30, 2008
* Karachi, Pakistan
* Los Mochis, Mexico
*2005 Malaysian haze
*2020 Summer Olympics
* Official Kuala Lumpur Website
* Kuala Lumpur City Hall
* ITIS Kuala Lumpur
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* Kuala Lumpur Hotels
* Kuala Lumpur City Guide - Explore, Share, Live and Love it!
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Kuala Lumpur (Jawi: ÙÙاÙا ÙÙÙ
Ú¤Ùر; translates as: "muddy confluence," "muddy estuary," and "muddy city"; in English; Kuala Lumpur. Dictionary.com. Retrieved November 2007. Malay , locally or even , and often abbreviated as K.L.), is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. The city proper, making up an area of , has an estimated population of 1.6 million in 2006. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.2 million. It is the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country, in terms of population as well as economy.
Kuala Lumpur is the seat of the Parliament of Malaysia. The city was once home to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, but they have since moved to Putrajaya starting in 1999. Some sections of the judiciary remain in the capital. The official residence of the Malaysian King, the Istana Negara, is also situated in Kuala Lumpur. The city is also the cultural and economic centre of Malaysia due to its position as the capital as well as being a primate city. Kuala Lumpur is rated as an alpha world city, and is the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Kuala Lumpur is defined within the borders of the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and is one of three Malaysian Federal Territories. It is an enclave within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Residents of the city are known as KLites.
Beginning in the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the Formula One World Championship. In addition, Kuala Lumpur is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Twin Towers.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two main airports, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport or better known as KLIA in Sepang and Subang International Airport which now only serve domestic flights within Malaysia.
Chinese Kapitan Yap Ah Loy, the founding father of Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur has its origins in the 1850s, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah, hired some Chinese labourers to open new and larger tin mines. They landed at the confluence of Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River) to open mines at Ampang. Sungai Gombak was previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river. The Original name for this city was "Pengkalan Lumpur", which means bundle of mud. As time passes by the name changed to Kuala Lumpur which literally means âmuddy confluenceâ in Bahasa Melayu. Later, tin mines were opened at Pudu and Batu. Among the early notable pioneers are Hiu Siew and Liu Ngim Kong.
These mines developed into a trading post which became to be considered a frontier town. Early Kuala Lumpur had many problems, including the Selangor Civil War; it was also plagued by diseases and constant fires and floods. Around the 1870s, the Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, emerged as leader, and became responsible for the survival and subsequent systematic growth of this town. He began to develop Kuala Lumpur from a small unknown place into a mining town with economic boom. In 1880, the state capital of Selangor was moved from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur.
In 1881, a flood swept through the town following a fire which engulfed it earlier. These successive problems destroyed the town's structures of wood and atap (thatching). As a response, Frank Swettenham, the British Resident of Selangor, required that buildings be constructed of brick and tile. Many of the new brick buildings mirrored that of shop houses in southern China, with "five foot ways" as well as skilled Chinese carpentry. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. A railway line increased accessibility into this town. Development intensified in the 1890s, leading to the creation of a Sanitary Board. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
A scene during World War II on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. The scene depicts Japanese troops clearing up the streets.
A mixture of different communities settled in various sections of Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square, east of Klang River, and towards Chinatown. The Malays, Indian Chettiars, and Indian Muslims resided along Java Street (now Jalan Tun Perak). The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, was the center of the British administrative offices.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Japanese army on January 11, 1942. They remained in occupation until August 15, 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaya, SeishirÅ Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew through the war, the rubber and tin commodity crashes and the Malayan Emergency, during which Malaya was preoccupied with the communist insurgency. In 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital through the formation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963.
On May 13, 1969, one of the worst race riots in Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur. The May 13 Incident was a riot between the Malays and the Chinese. The former being dissatisfied with their socio-political situation at the time. The riot resulted in the deaths of 196 people, Official figure, and led to a major reform in the country's economic policy favouring the Malays.
Kuala Lumpur later achieved city status in 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on February 1, 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory. Kuala Lumpur ceased to be the capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared as the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur was celebrated 100 years of local authority. The new federal territory of Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced.
In 1998, another political movement known as Reformasi took place mainly in this city. The movement was a result of the sacking of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and resulted in a chain of protests until 1999, where supporters of Anwar Ibrahim took to the streets to demand reforms in the government's administration, among others.
On February 1, 2001, Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).
A pedestrian mall by KL's central market.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterized by a huge valley known as Klang Valley. The valley is bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term which translates to "muddy confluence" as it is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers.
Located in the center of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was previously under the rule of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was separated from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian Federal Government. Its location on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, which has wider flat land than the east coast, has contributed to its faster development relative to other cities in Malaysia.
The municipality of the city covers an area of , with an average elevation of .
Protected by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur has a year-round equatorial Tropical rain forest climate (Köppen climate classification Af) which is warm and sunny, along with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between and have never exceeded , while minimums hover between and have never fallen below . Kuala Lumpur typically receives of rain annually; June and July are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds per month.
Flooding is a frequent occurrence in Kuala Lumpur whenever there is a heavy downpour, especially in the city centre and downstream areas. Dust particles from forest fires from nearby Sumatra sometimes cast a haze over the region. It is a major source of pollution in the city together with open burning, emission from motor vehicles and construction work.
Bahasa Melayu the national language, is the principal language of Kuala Lumpur. Other major languages spoken in the city are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Tamil. English has a strong presence, especially in business and is a compulsory language taught in schools.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park
Kuala Lumpur also has a mix of different cultures which include Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, as well as Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from East Malaysia and Peninsula Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur's rapid development triggered a huge influx of foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam into Malaysia.
In the late-18th century, when Europe underwent Industrial Revolution, large groups of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong in China were brought in to Malaya to work in the booming tin mining industry. The Chinese in Kuala Lumpur speak different dialects but the majority in Kuala Lumpur are of Cantonese descent, and the Hakkas.
Indians form 10% of the population in Kuala Lumpur (as in 2000), mostly practise Hinduism and speak Tamil and other Indian and Pakistani languages such as Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Pashtu. Historically, most of the Indians were brought in during the British colonisation of the Malaysia. Their popular festivals are Thaipusam, Deepavali and Pongal.
Islam is practised primarily by the Malays and the Indian Muslim communities. Other major religions are Hinduism (mainly among Indians), Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (mainly among Chinese) and Christianity. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population.
The connecting bridge between Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens, spanning above the central boulevard.
The estimated population of Kuala Lumpur in the city proper for 2006 was 1.58 million. "Basic Population Characteristics by Administrative Districts", Department of Statistics, Malaysia (June 2006) It has a population density of , and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. With an estimated metropolitan population of 6.9 million in 2007, it can be considered a primate city. The continuing decline in the birth rate for Kuala Lumpur has resulted in the decline in the proportion of young people below 15 years old from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15â59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Based on the census of the Department of Statistics (see the percentage of Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur alone was around 38% in 2000 (next census is in 2010) while the Chinese population comprised 43% and Indians 10%. A notable phenomenon has been the increase in the presence of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, who now constitute about 9% of the cityâs population.
Crime in Kuala Lumpur has been a concern of residents in recent years. Among the crimes showing increasing rates were snatch theft, drug addiction, gambling and vice.
The Kuala Lumpur City Hall
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur They are responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Since Kuala Lumpur became a Federal Territory of Malaysia on February 1, 1974, the city has been led by nine mayors. The current mayor of Kuala Lumpur is Dato' Ahmad Fuad Ismail, who is in his first term of office. (14 December 2008)
"Pengenalan".Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur He was appointed in 2008.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The parliament is composed of a lower House of Representatives (Dewan Rakyat) and an upper House of Senate (Dewan Negara). The city is represented in the lower House of Representatives by eleven Members of Parliament (MPs), who are elected to five-year terms. Traditionally, political leanings in Kuala Lumpur have been dominated by Barisan Nasional (BN), with seven representatives from BN and the other four from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) prior to the 2008 General Elections. After the 2008 elections BN was left with just one representative, Zulhasnan Rafique, in the Setiawangsa seat. DAP took control of five seats, Parti Keadilan Rakyat taking four seats, and PAS one seat, marking the first time in which the majority of the Federal Territory's constituencies was dominated by opposition parties.
A street view of the Old Market Square (Medan Pasar)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialized and economically, the fastest growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain governmentâs important machineries such as Bank Negara Malaysia (Central Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city.
The city remains as the economic and business center of the country. In fact, the city is a center for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. The infrastructure development in the surrounding areas such as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Sepang, the creation of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the expansion of Port Klang further reinforce the economic significance of the city.
Bursa Malaysia or the Malaysia Exchange is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 20 November 2007, the market capitalisation stood at US$318.65 billion.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM25,968 million in 2000 with an average annual growth rate of 4.2 percent. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in year 2000 is RM30,727, an average annual growth rate of 6.1 percent. The total employment in Kuala Lumpur is estimated at around 838,400. The service sector comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
Pre-war shoplots refurbished into restaurants and bars along Tengkat Tong Shin.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic Financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic Financing and the strong presence of Gulf's financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companiesâ regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the countriesâ largest companies have their headquarters based here and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur. Largest Company in Malaysia 2007
Other important economic activities in the city are education and health services. Kuala Lumpur also has advantages stemming from the high concentration of educational institutions located within its boundaries, providing a wide range of courses. Such public institutions include the International Islamic University Malaysia, University of Malaya, the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, International Medical University and the Medical Faculty of the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. There are also a large number of private colleges, including the Universiti Tun Abdul Razak and Tunku Abdul Rahman College, in and around Kuala Lumpur providing a wide range of courses which attract students from all over Malaysia as well as from other countries. There are numerous public and private medical specialist centres and hospitals in the city which offer general health services and a wide range of specialist surgery and treatment catering to locals and tourists.
There has been growing emphasis to expand the economic scope of the city into other service activities such as research and development which supports the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centers such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research and more research centers are expected to be established in the coming years.
Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur's bustling Chinatown
The tourism sector also plays an important part in the cityâs economy, providing income, employment and expanding business opportunities. As an extension of this, many large worldwide hotel chains have presence in the city. Kuala Lumpur has also developed into an international shopping destination with a wide variety of shopping centres and megamalls which carry well-known global and local brands. Conference tourismâwhich mainly encompass conventionsâhas also expanded in recent years and is becoming a very important component of the industry.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Dataran Merdeka (the Independence Square), the House of Parliament, the Istana Budaya, the Istana Negara (National Palace), the Kuala Lumpur Tower, the Muzium Negara (National Museum), the Putra World Trade Centre, the Tugu Negara (National Monument) and mosques such as the Masjid Jamek, the Masjid Negara (National Mosque) and the Federal Territory Mosque.
Other tourist attractions include the Aquaria KLCC, the Batu Caves, the Makam Pahlawan (National Mausoleum), the National Science Centre, Petaling Street, the Royal Selangor Pewter Visitor Centre, the Zoo Negara (National Zoo), and events such as Malay cultural centres, the Chinese cultural festivals at the Thean Hou Temple and the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. The Golden Triangle, the commercial hub of the city, contains the Petronas Twin Towers and has a distinctive nightlife. Trendy nightclubs, bars and lounges, such as the Beach Club, Espanda, the Hakka Republic Wine Bar & Restaurant, Hard Rock Cafe, the Luna Bar, Nuovo, Rum Jungle, the Thai Club, Zouk, and many others are located within and around Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail and Jalan Ampang.
Hotels, from five-star to budget types, have cropped up everywhere to accommodate the influx of tourists each year. There are many hotels near Kuala Lumpur's entertainment and business districts.
Berjaya Times Square, the world's largest building ever built in a single phase
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and it is the retail and fashion hub for Malaysia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (USD 2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006. and Kuala Lumpur plays a big role in attracting consumers.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers.
Apart from Suria KLCC, Bukit Bintang, which resembles Tokyo's Ginza, New York's Fifth Avenue and Singapore's Orchard Road has the highest concentration of shopping outlets in Kuala Lumpur. Bukit Bintang, which is part of the Kuala Lumpur's Golden Triangle, spans over 3 roads, namely Jalan Bukit Bintang, Jalan Imbi and Jalan Sultan Ismail. It houses various cafes, alfresco (open air) dining outlets and shopping complexes such as Berjaya Plaza, Berjaya Times Square, Bukit Bintang Plaza, Imbi Plaza, Kuala Lumpur Plaza, Lot 10, Low Yat Plaza, Pavilion KL, Starhill Plaza and Sungei Wang Plaza. It is also the location of the largest single department store in Malaysia, SOGO Kuala Lumpur KL SOGO, Corporate. Retrieved on 2008-11-10. (also known as KL SOGO) which is located at a landmark site on Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, one of the best known shopping streets for locals in Kuala Lumpur.
The Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Mid Valley Megamall and The Gardens. The Damansara area north-west of Kuala Lumpur, though not in the city-proper, is the home of the only IKEA outlet in the country, and a cluster of locally-operated malls like Cathay Multi Screen Cinemas, The Curve, Ikano Power Centre, NiuXehSui at Ara Damansara and One Utama.
The Central Market, which is located in the proximity of the Dayabumi Complex, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, or commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and European traditions influence. Gurstien, P (1985) Malaysia Architecture Heritage Survey â A Handbook, Malaysia Heritage Trust. Page 65 Google cache of 'HISTORICAL BUILDINGS IN MALAYSIA' The Kuala Lumpur's Central Market, which was once the city's wet market, offers an assortment of arts and craft merchandise, varying from antiques and paintings to souvenirs and clothing. It is also known as Pasar Seni in Malay.
Since 2000, the Ministry of Tourism of Malaysia has kick-started the mega sale event for all shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held thrice in a year in March, May and December where all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination. Malaysia Hotels Blog
Kuala Lumpur skyline at night
The Petronas Twin Towers at dusk.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a blend of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture mix. Being a relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's colonial buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings have Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. extract Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and acclimatised to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around.
The Petronas Twin Towers seen from Pertama Complex.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two storeys with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today around Medan Pasar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with the rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated with the designs of the building, signifying Islamic restriction on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Menara Telekom, Menara Maybank, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Center. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact it is a place of science and knowledge. The tall Petronas Twin Towers were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With the economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all glass shell appears around the city, with the most prominent example being the Petronas Twin Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Mega-Urbanization in Southeast Asia
Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted around the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park as seen from the Traders Hotel
The Perdana Lake Gardens, a manicured garden near the Malaysian Parliament building, was once home to a British colonial official. The park includes a Butterfly Park, Deer Park, Orchid Garden, Hibiscus Garden and Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, Southeast Asia's largest bird park. Other parks in the city include, the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Forest Research Institute Malaysia, FRIM Photos /ref> Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queenâs Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, Equestrian Park and West Valley Park near TTDI, and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city namely the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country , Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve ( ) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve ( ). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species particularly monkeys, tree shrews, squirrels and birds.
Frieze depicting Malaysian history at the National Museum
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artifacts and paintings collected throughout the country.
Kuala Lumpur also has an Islamic Arts Museum which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits as well as a library of Islamic art books. However, the museum's collection not only concentrate on works from the Middle East, the museum also puts the emphasis on Asia, with China and Southeast Asia especially well represented. This museum features some impressively decorated domes and large open exhibition spaces. It is located at Jalan Lembah Perdana next to the National Mosque.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances.
Kuala Lumpur City Centre Park at night.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a site neighbouring the National Theater (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and trustee of the national art heritage.
The Petronas Art Gallery, another centre for fine art, is situated in Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC). The Galeri Tangsi near Dataran Merdeka houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West is one of the most established centres for the performing arts, notably theatre, music, and film screening, in the country. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. One of the highlights in 2006 was the KL Sing Song 2006 music fest which featured Malaysian singer-songwriters of various cultural backgrounds, from both West and East Malaysia, through two days of performances and workshops.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands as well as local designers.
Royal Selangor has an ultra modern Visitor Centre, which allows tours to be conducted through its pewter museum, gallery and its factory. In its pewtersmithing workshop, "The School of Hard Knocks," participants are taught to create their own pewter dish using traditional tools and methods.
The National Stadium at Bukit Jalil.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from in 1984 to in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship, the open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix and the Motorcycle Grand Prix with races being held at Sepang International Circuit in the neighbouring state of Selangor, next to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The Formula One event contributes significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6% increase in tourist arrivals.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event is held annually in the city. This annual event draws the worldâs top riders and their prized horses to Malaysia.
Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race.
The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur has a considerable array of sports facilities of international class after hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Many of these facilities including the main stadium (with running track and a football field), hockey stadium and swimming pools are located in the National Sports Complex at Bukit Jalil while a velodrome and more swimming pools are located in Bandar Tun Razak, next to the Taman Tasik Permaisuri Lake Gardens. There are also soccer fields, local sports complexes, swimming pools and tennis courts scattered around the suburbs. Badminton and âtakrawâ courts are usually included in community halls.
Kuala Lumpur has several golf courses including the Kuala Lumpur Golf and Country Club (KLGCC) and the Malaysia Civil Service Golf Club in Kiara and the Berjaya Golf Course at Bukit Jalil.
The city also has numerous large private fitness centers run by Celebrity Fitness, Fitness First, True Fitness and major five-star hotels.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birth place of Hashing which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
The Kuala Lumpur Tower is an important broadcast centre in the country.
There are several newspapers, including daily newspapers, opposition newspaper, business newspapers and also a digital newspaper, based in Kuala Lumpur. Daily newspapers include Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Harian Metro, The Star, New Straits Times, The Sun, Malay Mail, Kosmo! as well as other language newspapers like Sin Chew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau and others oppositions newspapers such as Harakah, Suara Keadilan, Siasah and Wasilah. Kuala Lumpur is also the headquarters for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM and Media Prima, a media corporation which houses the commercial television stations TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9. Programmes are broadcast in Malay, English, Chinese and Tamil.
TM Tower is the headquarters of Malaysia's principal telecommunication service provider, Telekom Malaysia.
The city is also home to the country's main pay-TV service, Astro, a satellite television service, which broadcasts local and global television channels such as CNN, BBC World, Star World and HBO. Astro official website Al-Jazeera, the Doha-based Arab news network has launched a new English-speaking channel called Al-Jazeera English to boost its international viewership with one of its broadcast centers based in Kuala Lumpur. Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong based television broadcaster has also announced plans to expand its regional business by partnership with local satellite TV provider, Astro. Astro launches Phoenix InfoNews Channel InfoNews Channel launches its broadcast services in Malaysia via Astro The Hong Kong office of Channel V International, an international music channel, relocated its programme production unit in Kuala Lumpur by appointing the local company Double Vision Sdn Bhd.
In March 2008, Time Out, the international listings and events magazine, launched in Kuala Lumpur as its 24th global city.
Kuala Lumpur has been featured in all aspects of popular culture such as movies, television, music and books. Movies set in Kuala Lumpur include Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Children of Men, (starring Clive Owen) where the Petronas Twin Towers were depicted in flames for a few seconds. Books which were set in Kuala Lumpur include KL 24/7 by Ida M Rahim, Shireen Zainudin and Rizal Zainudin, My Life As a Fake by Peter Carey, and Democracy by Joan Didion. Kuala Lumpur is also mentioned in many songs by local Malaysian artists such as Keroncong Kuala Lumpur by P. Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur, Ibu Kota by Saloma, Chow Kit Road by Sudirman Arshad, Senyumlah Kuala Lumpur by Alleycats, Streets of Kuala Lumpur by Murkyway, K.L. by Vandal, Kuala Lumpur by Poetic Ammo, Anak Dara by Azmyl Yunor and KL by Too Phat. Kuala Lumpur was also one of the destinations in The Amazing Race Asia and The Amazing Race. Games have also been set in Kuala Lumpur. They include three levels of the game and two levels of the PlayStation 2 game Burnout.
The old Moorish influenced KL train station was completed in 1910
The busy Jalan Ampang at night leading straight to the Petronas Towers.
Unlike most other Asian cities, driving is the main mode of commuting in Kuala Lumpur. Hence, every part of the city is well connected by highways. As capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network that leads to the rest of Peninsular Malaysia.
In terms of air connectivity, Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, formerly known as Subang International Airport and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998. KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations in six continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres high-speed train service from KL Sentral which takes only twenty-eight minutes, while travelling by car via highway will take about an hour. As of 2007, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprops flights by airlines such as Firefly and Berjaya Air.
KL Sentral at night.
Public transport on Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote usage of public transportation, utilisation rates are low as only 16 percent of the population used public transportation in 2006. The rapid transit system in Kuala Lumpur consists of three separate rail systems which meet in the city and extends towards other parts of Klang Valley. The rail systems are RapidKL RAIL, KL Monorail, and KTM Komuter. These lines have either underground or elevated stations around the city. The main rapid transit hub is KL Sentral which facilitates as an interchange station for the rail systems. KL Sentral is also a hub for intercity railway operated by KTM Intercity. It provides rail services to as far as Singapore in the south, and Hat Yai, Thailand, in the north.
Platform of the KLCC LRT station along the Kelana Jaya Line (Putra LRT) in Kuala Lumpur.
The largest public transportation operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley is RapidKL. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, RapidKL has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley metropolitan area Rapid KL to revamp network to increase ridership and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transportation system. The management of RapidKL has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and cut down the need of more buses. RapidKL is also the operator of three rapid transit rail lines in Kuala Lumpur, namely Ampang Line, Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya Line.
Kuala Lumpur is served by Port Klang, located about southwest of the city. The port is the largest and busiest in the country handling about of cargo in 2006.
Victoria Institution is one of the oldest secondary schools in the country.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject and is used as the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences. There are also schools which provide Mandarin and Tamil as languages of instruction for certain subjects.
In Kuala Lumpur alone, there are 13 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
There are several notable institutions located in the city which have existed for more than 100 years, such as Victoria Institution (1893); Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur (1896); Methodist Boys' School (1897); Convent Bukit Nanas (1899) and St. John's Institution (1904).
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya. Established in 1962, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It is also the most prestigious tertiary institution in Malaysia, having been ranked first among the universities in Malaysia in the 2004 THES international rankings. In recent years, the number of international students at University of Malaya has risen, a result of increasing efforts made to attract more international students.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include UCSI University, International Medical University, Open University Malaysia, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Wawasan Open University and the branch campus of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies in the field of army, navy, and air force.
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* Malacca, Malaysia (April 15, 1989) Kuala Lumpur fact file, Asian-Pacific City Summit. Retrieved on November 3, 2007.
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | Wasn't Leonardo da Vinci valued as an engineer? | no | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | Wasn't Leonardo da Vinci born on April 15? | Yes, Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15. | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | Who left Verroccio's studio? | Leonardo da Vinci left Verroccio's studio. | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | When did Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ( " The Courtier " ), write? | 1528 | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | When did he flee to Venice? | In 1499. | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | Was Leonardo a contemporary of Botticelli Domenico Ghirlandaio as well as Perugino? | Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino. | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | Is the larger work now almost universally attributed to Leonardo? | Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo. | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* [The chapter "The Graphic Works" is by Frank Zollner & Johannes Nathan].
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | Has Leonardo often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention? | Yes | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | Is he widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived? | Yes. | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* [The chapter "The Graphic Works" is by Frank Zollner & Johannes Nathan].
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo_da_Vinci | According to art historian Helen Gardner, were the scope and depth of his interests without precedent and ``his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote''? | Yes | data/set6/a3 | Leonardo_da_Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ( ), (April 15, 1452 â May 2, 1519), was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer.
Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon, etc. See specific quotations under heading "Leonardo, the legend". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about the man himself, Leonardo's vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: Vitruvian Man, Fine Art Classics, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference; The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. There are 15 significant artworks which are ascribed, either in whole or in large part, to Leonardo by most art historians. This number is made up principally of paintings on panel but includes a mural, a large drawing on paper and two works which are in the early stages of preparation. There are a number of other works that have also been variously attributed to Leonardo. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, Modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. See expanded in article Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
alt=Photo of a building of rough stone with small windows, surrounded by olive trees.
alt=Pen drawing of a landscape with mountains, a river in a deep valley, and a small castle.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. His birth is recorded in the diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio, as cited by Angela Ottino della Chiesa in Leonardo da Vinci, p.83 He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean". According to Alessandro Vezzosi, Head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a Middle Eastern slave called Caterina. That Leonardo had Middle Eastern blood is claimed to be supported by the reconstruction of a fingerprint as reported by Marta Falconi, Associated Press Writer, " Experts Reconstruct Leonardo Fingerprint" December 12, 2006", accessed 2010-01-06. The evidence as stated in the article is that 60% of people of Middle Eastern Origin share the pattern of whorls found on the reconstructed fingerprint. The article also states that the claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences," he said, especially if looking at only one finger." Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci".
Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs. Rosci, p.20 In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. Rosci, p.21 The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.
alt=Painting showing Jesus, naked except for a loin-cloth, standing in a shallow stream in a rocky landscape, while to the right, John the Baptist, identifiable by the cross that he carries, tips water over Jesus' head. Two angels kneel at the left. Above Jesus are the hands of God, and a dove descending.
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Rosci, p.13 Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills Rosci, p.27 including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling. The "diverse arts" and technicall skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th century text On Divers Arts by Theophilus and in the early 15th century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.
Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. Vasari, p.258 This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. della Chiesa, p.88
Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473. This work is now in the collection of the Uffizi, Drawing No. 8P.
alt=An unfinished painting showing the Virgin Mary and Christ Child surrounded by many figures who are all crowding to look at the baby. Behind the figures is a distant landscape and a large ruined building. More people are coming, in the distance.
Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts, In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchioand The Adoration of the Magi in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo deâ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother. Codex II, 95 r, Victoria and Albert Museum, as cited by della Chiesa p. 85
He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni was not cast until 1488, after his death, and after Leonardo had already begun work on the statue for Ludovico.
alt=A page with two drawings of a war-horse, one from the side, and the other showing the chest and right leg.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, della Chiesa, p.85 where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival". Vasari, p.256 In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David. Gaetano Milanesi, Epistolario Buonarroti, Florence (1875), as cited by della Chiesa.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. D'Oggione is known in part for his contemporary copies of the Last Supper. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila. della Chiesa, p.86
alt=Photo of a large medieval house, built of brick with many windows and gables and a circular tower with a conical roof.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Georges Goyau, François I], Transcribed by Gerald Rossi. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI. Published 1909. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2007-10-04 It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Vasari, p.265 In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé Clos Lucé, also called Cloux, is now a public museum. near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King François cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed. However, White in Leonardo: The First Scientist points out that the edict was not signed by the king himself. For such images, see Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari, p.270 In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."
Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.
Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Humanist thought and culture. Rosci, p. 13 Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.
Rosci, Leonardo, chapter 1, the historical setting, pp.9-20
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, Piero della Francesca, On Perspective for Painting (De Prospectiva Pingendi) and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura, 1435. On Painting, in English, De Pictura, in Latin were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist. ,
Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised. Hartt, pp.391-2
Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479â1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.
Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, Vasari, p.253 as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them. Vasari, p.257 Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science (1898), quoted at Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, (1910), as cited by Daniel Arasse in his prologue Leonardo and Freud, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi, Melzi describing Leonardo's feelings for him as both loving and intensely passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships epigraph, p. 148 & N120 p.298
Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)âLouvre
Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Leonardo, Codex C. 15v, Institut of France. Trans. Richter Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. della Chiesa, p.84 Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.
Annunciation (1475â1480)âUffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work
Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter. His fame is discussed by Daniel Arasse in Leonardo da Vinci, pp.11-15
These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. These qualities of Leonardo's works are discussed by Frederick Hartt in A History of Italian Renaissance Art, pp.387-411.
Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican
Leonardo's early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, long and high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, long. della Chiesa, pp. 88, 90 In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.
Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505â1508, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature.
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."
Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about . Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo deâ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Wasserman, p.108 Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.
While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.
The Last Supper (1498)âConvent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. Wasserman, p.124 This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model. Vasari, p.263
When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, Vasari, p.262 but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". della Chiesa, p.97 Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. della Chiesa, p.98 Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503â1505/1507)âLouvre, Paris, France
Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original". Vasari, p.267
Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." Vasari, p.266 The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date. della Chiesa, p.103
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" Wasserman, p.150 and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, della Chiesa, p.109 and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499â1500)âNational Gallery, London
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.
His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160Ã100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre. della Chiesa, p.102
Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. Vasari, p.261 There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". The "Grecian profile" has a continuous straight line from forehead to nose-tip, the bridge of the nose being exceptionally high. It is a feature of many Classical Greek statues. These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. Left-handed writers using a split nib or quill pen experience difficulty pushing the pen from left to right across the page. A page from Leonardo's journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle
His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.
These notebooksâoriginally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his deathâhave found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-19074v and RL 19102 respectively. This method of organisation minimises of loss of data in the case of pages being mixed up or destroyed. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's De Divina Proportione
Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517.
Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, della Chiesa, p.117 with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".
A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leonardo; Inside the Mind of the Genius of the Renaissance. (New York, Doubleday, 2007) argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.
Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.
A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. The Leonardo Bridge Project On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), aired in October 2005, a television programme called "Leonardo's Dream Machines", about the building and successful flight of a glider based on Leonardo's design.
Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818.
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. see reference to this in section "Old age". The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, Vasari, p.255 introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:
alt=Statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Luigi Pampaloni, Uffizi
The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..."
while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...". "Anonimo Gaddiani", elaborating on Libro di Antonio Billi, 1537â1542
The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..."
This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."
The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.
Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."
*Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Leonardo da Vinci's personal life
*List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci
*Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
*Aerial perspective
*History of the internal combustion engine
*Italian Renaissance painting
*Leonardo da Vinci Airport
*Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute
*List of Italian painters
*Medical Renaissance
*Renaissance technology
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* Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)
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* Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
* Vasari Life of Leonardo: in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
* Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
* Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
* Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
* The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
* Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
* The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
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Lobster | Are lobsters invertebrates? | Yes | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Are lobsters invertebrates? | Yes | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Are lobsters kosher? | No | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Are lobsters kosher? | No | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Do lobsters have blue blood? | yes | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Do lobsters have blue blood? | Yes | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | How many legs do lobsters have? | 10. | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | How many legs do lobsters have? | 10 | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Where are lobsters found? | In all oceans. | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Where are lobsters found? | In all oceans | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | What is the mean level of mercury in American lobsters? | 0.31 ppm | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | What is the mean level of mercury in American lobsters? | 0.31 ppm | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Do lobsters feel pain? | yes. | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Do lobsters feel pain? | Yes | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Did the Moche people worship lobsters? | yes. | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | Did the Moche people worship lobsters? | Yes | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | What is the caridoid escape reaction? | Swimming backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lobster | What is the caridoid escape reaction? | When lobsters swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen | data/set1/a5 | Lobster
Clawed lobsters comprise a family (Nephropidae, sometimes also Homaridae) of large marine crustaceans. Lobsters are economically important as seafood, forming the basis of a global industry that nets more than US$1 billion annually.
Though several groups of crustaceans are known as "lobsters," the clawed lobsters are most often associated with the name. They are also revered for their flavor and texture. Clawed lobsters are not closely related to spiny lobsters or slipper lobsters, which have no claws (chelae), or squat lobsters. The closest relatives of clawed lobsters are the reef lobsters and the three families of freshwater crayfish.
The fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous .
Lobsters are found in all oceans. They live on rocky, sandy, or muddy bottoms from the shoreline to beyond the edge of the continental shelf. They generally live singly in crevices or in burrows under rocks.
They are invertebrates, with a hard protective exoskeleton. Like most arthropods, lobsters must molt in order to grow, which leaves them vulnerable. During the molting process, several species change color. Lobsters have 10 walking legs; the front two adapted to claws.
As arthropods, lobsters have not developed the nervous system of cephalopod mollusks, nor do they have the advantages of good eyesight. They do, however, exhibit three remarkable evolutionary advances that have led to their great success. Their exoskeleton is a strong, lightweight, form-fitted external covering and support. They possess striated muscle: quick, strong, and lightweight, it enables rapid movement. Finally, articulated appendages allow their limbs to bend at specific points.
Lobsters are omnivores, and typically eat live prey such as fish, mollusks, other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. They scavenge if necessary, and may resort to cannibalism in captivity; however, this has not been observed in the wild. Although lobster skin has been found in lobster stomachs, this is because lobsters eat their shed skin after molting.
Although clawed lobsters, like most other arthropods, are largely bilaterally symmetrical, they often possess unequal, specialized claws, like the king crab. The claw of a freshly caught lobster is full and fleshy, not atrophied. Lobster anatomy includes the cephalothorax which fuses the head and the thorax, both of which are covered by the chitinous carapace and the abdomen. The lobster's head consists of antennae, antennules, mandibles, the first and second maxillae, and the first, second, and third maxillipeds. Because lobsters live in a murky environment at the bottom of the ocean, they mostly use their antennae as sensors. The lobster eye has a reflective structure atop a convex retina. In contrast, most complex eyes use refractive ray concentrators (lenses) and a concave retina. The abdomen includes swimmerets and its tail is composed of uropods and the telson.
Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of haemocyanin, which contains copper. (In contrast, mammals and many other animals have red blood from iron-rich haemoglobin.) Lobsters possess a green organ, called tomalley by chefs, which serves as the hepatopancreas, functioning as both liver and pancreas.
In general, lobsters are and move by slowly walking on the bottom of the sea floor. However, when they flee, they swim backwards quickly by curling and uncurling their abdomen. A speed of five meters per second (about 11 mph) has been recorded. This is known as the caridoid escape reaction.
Animals of the genus Symbion, the only member of the animal phylum Cycliophora, live on lobster gills and mouthparts. To date it has only been found associated with lobsters.
Recent research has led scientists to believe that lobsters may be one of a small number of species which do not die of aging. Lobsters do not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age. In fact, older lobsters are more fertile than younger lobsters. The reason for this infinite longevity is said to be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs DNA sequences of the form "TTAGGG". This sequence is often referred to as the telomeres of the DNA. In fact, lobsters may exhibit negligible senescence, in that they effectively live indefinitely, barring injury, disease, capture, etc. They can thus reach impressive sizes. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest lobster was caught in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed .
alt=Photo of person holding a large, live lobster
alt=Photo of restaurant table holding a platter featuring unshelled lobster legs and claws
alt=Photo of split lobster claw on plate, covered by onions
Lobster recipes include Lobster Newberg and Lobster Thermidor. Lobster is used variously, for example in soup, bisque or lobster rolls. Lobster meat may be dipped in clarified butter, resulting in a sweetened flavor.
Cooks boil live lobsters in water or steam. The lobster simmers for seven minutes for the first pound and three minutes for each additional pound.
Lobsters are also fried, grilled, or baked.
According to the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the mean level of mercury in American lobster is 0.31 ppm, which is moderately high.
Lobsters are sold alive with claws strapped or banded to prevent them from injuring each other or people. The banding causes the claws to gradually atrophy. Lobsters may be prepared and cooked while alive; removing their claws may not kill them. As with all shellfish, lobster is not kosher. The majority of the meat is in the tail and the two front claws. The legs and torso contain smaller quantities. Freezing the lobster may toughen the meat. A common misconception is that a lobster screams when boiled; actually the whistling sound is steam escaping the shell.
The European wild lobster, including the royal blue lobster of Audresselles, is more expensive and rare than the American lobster. It was consumed chiefly by the royal and aristocratic families of France and the Netherlands. Such scenes were depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In North America, the American lobster did not achieve popularity until the mid-19th century, when New Yorkers and Bostonians developed a taste; not until the invention of a special vessel, the lobster smack, did a commercial fishery flourish. Prior to this time, lobster was considered a mark of poverty or as a food for indentured servants or lower members of society in Maine, Massachusetts and the Canadian Maritimes, and servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice per week. In Canada, outside of the rural outposts lobster was sold canned. New England's fresh lobster trade extended as far as Philadelphia.
The lobster market changed once the transportation industry could deliver live lobsters to urban centers. Fresh lobster became a luxury food and a tourist attraction for the Maritime provinces and a luxury export to Europe and Japan where it is especially expensive.
Lobster's high price led to the creation of "faux lobster". It is often made from pollock or other whitefish. A few restaurants sell "langostino lobster". Langostino translates into prawn; the actual animal may be crab. The spiny lobster is also called langouste.
Due to the ambiguous nature of suffering, the issue of lobster pain may be argued by analogy that lobster biology is similar to human biology or that lobster behavior warrants assumptions that lobsters can feel pain.
The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety tentatively concluded that "it is unlikely that [lobsters] can feel pain," though they note:
"there is apparently a paucity of exact knowledge on sentience in crustaceans, and more research is needed."
This conclusion is based on the lobster's simple nervous system. The report assumes that the violent reaction of lobsters to boiling water is a reflex to noxious stimuli.
However, review by the Scottish animal rights group Advocate for Animals released the same year reported:
"scientific evidence ... strongly suggests that there is a potential for [lobsters] to experience pain and suffering,"
primarily because lobsters (and other decapod crustaceans) "have opioid receptors and respond to opioids (analgesics such as morphine) in a similar way to vertebrates," indicating that lobsters' reaction to injury changes in the presence of painkillers. The similarities in lobsters' and vertebrates' stress systems and behavioral responses to noxious stimuli were given as additional evidence.
A 2007 study at Queen's University, Belfast, suggested that crustaceans do feel pain. In the experiment, when prawn antennae were rubbed with sodium hydroxide or acetic acid, the animals showed increased grooming of the afflicted area and rubbed it more against the side of the tank. Moreover, this reaction was inhibited by a local anesthetic, even though control prawns treated with only anesthetic did not show reduced activity. Professor Robert Elwood, who headed the study, argues that sensing pain is crucial to prawn survival, because it encourages them to avoid damaging behaviors. Some scientists responded, saying the rubbing may reflect an attempt to clean the affected area.
In a 2009 study, Prof. Elwood and Mirjam Appel showed that hermit crabs make motivational tradeoffs between shocks and the quality of the shells they inhabit. In particular, as crabs are shocked more intensely, they become increasingly willing to leave their current shells for new shells, and they spend less time deciding whether to enter those new shells. Moreover, because the researchers did not offer the new shells until after the electrical stimulation had ended, the behavior change resulted from memory of the noxious event, not an immediate reflex.
alt=Photo of abstract lobster sculpture
In vertebrates, endogenous opioids are neurochemicals that moderate pain by interacting with opiate receptors. Opioid peptides and opiate receptors occur naturally in crustaceans, and although The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety claims that âat present no certain conclusion can be drawn,â critics interpret their presence as an indication that lobsters experience pain. The aforementioned Scottish paper holds that vertebrates and lobsters' opioids may "mediate pain in the same way".
Morphine, an analgesic, and naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, may affect a related species of crustacean (Chasmagnathus granulatus) in much the same way they affect vertebrates: injections of morphine into crabs produced a dose-dependent reduction of their defensive response to an electric shock. (However, the attenuated defensive response could originate from either the analgesic or sedative properties of morphine, or both.) These findings have been replicated for other invertebrate species, but similar data is not yet available for lobsters.
The most common way of killing a lobster is by placing it, live, in boiling water, or by splitting: severing the body in half, lengthwise.
The boiling method (also used to kill crabs, crayfish and shrimp) is controversial because some believe that the lobster suffers. The practice is illegal in some places, such as in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where offenders face fines of up to â¬495. The Norwegian study states that the lobster may be de-sensitized by placing it in a salt solution 15 minutes before killing it.
In 2006, British inventor Simon Buckhaven invented the Crustastun, which electrocutes lobsters with a 110 V electric shock, killing them in five seconds. This ensures a quicker death for the lobster. Seafood wholesalers in Britain use a commercial version. A home version was released to the public in about 2006.
alt=Photo of four fishing boats, moored two abreast, to dock
Lobsters are caught using baited, one-way traps with a color-coded marker buoy to mark cages. Lobster is fished in water between , although some lobsters live at . Cages are of plastic-coated galvanized steel or wood. A lobster fisher may tend as many as 2,000 traps. Around the year 2000, due to overfishing and high demand, lobster farming expanded. As of 2008, no lobster farming operation had achieved commercial success.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped the sea and its animals. Moche art often depicted lobsters.
Lobsters dance a "Lobster Quadrille" in the eponymous chapter of Lewis Carroll's famous book Alice in Wonderland. It and the related lobster poems can be read here: "Will you, wonât you, will you, wonât you, wonât you join the dance?" and ''"Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare."
''
This list contains all known species in the family Nephropidae:
* Acanthacaris caeca
* Acanthacaris tenuimana
* Eunephrops bairdii
* Eunephrops cadenasi
* Eunephrops luckhursti
* Eunephrops manningi
* Homarinus capensis â Cape lobster
* Homarus americanus â American lobster
* Homarus gammarus â European lobster
* Metanephrops andamanicus â Andaman lobster
* Metanephrops arafurensis
* Metanephrops armatus
* Metanephrops australiensis â Australian scampi
* Metanephrops binghami â Caribbean lobster
* Metanephrops boschmai â bight lobster
* Metanephrops challengeri â New Zealand scampi
* Metanephrops formosanus
* Metanephrops japonicus â Japanese lobster
* Metanephrops mozambicus
* Metanephrops neptunus
* Metanephrops rubellus
* Metanephrops sagamiensis
* Metanephrops sibogae
* Metanephrops sinensis â China lobster
* Metanephrops thomsoni
* Metanephrops velutinus
* Nephropides caribaeus
* Nephrops norvegicus â Norway lobster
* Nephropsis acanthura
* Nephropsis aculeata â Florida lobsterette
* Nephropsis agassizii
* Nephropsis atlantica
* Nephropsis carpenteri
* Nephropsis ensirostris
* Nephropsis hamadai
* Nephropsis holthuisii
* Nephropsis macphersoni
* Nephropsis malhaensis
* Nephropsis neglecta
* Nephropsis occidentalis
* Nephropsis rosea
* Nephropsis serrata
* Nephropsis stewarti
* Nephropsis suhmi
* Nephropsis sulcata
* Thymopides grobovi
* Thymops birsteini
* Thymopsis nilenta
*
* Atlantic Veterinary College Lobster Science Centre
* Lobster Recipes & Cooking Lobster Guides
* How to Cook Lobster, How to Eat Lobster
|
Lyre | Were the recitations of the Ancient Greeks accompanied by lyre playing? | Yes | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Were the recitations of the Ancient Greeks accompanied by lyre playing? | null | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Does a classical lyre have a hollow body? | Yes | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Does a classical lyre have a hollow body? | null | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Is the lyre a stringed musical instrument? | Yes | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Is the lyre a stringed musical instrument? | null | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Which constellation is said to resemble a lyre shape? | Lyra | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Which constellation is said to resemble a lyre shape? | null | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | How many raised arms are extending from the sound-chest of a classical lyre? | Two | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | How many raised arms are extending from the sound-chest of a classical lyre? | null | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | What were the strings of a classical lyre made of? | Gut | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | What were the strings of a classical lyre made of? | null | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Is the foot pedal framework for a piano called a lyre? | Yes | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Is the foot pedal framework for a piano called a lyre? | null | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Where was the deepest note of the classical lyre in relation to the player's body? | It was farthest from the player's body. | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Where was the deepest note of the classical lyre in relation to the player's body? | null | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Does a standard piano have fewer strings than a harp? | No | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Lyre | Does a standard piano have fewer strings than a harp? | null | data/set2/a10 | Lyre
The lyre is a stringed musical instrument well known for its use in classical antiquity and later. The recitations of the Ancient Greeks were accompanied by lyre playing. The lyre of Classical Antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed with a plectrum, like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked, like a harp. The fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings in the chord.
Lyres from various times and places are regarded by some organologists (specialists in the history of musical instruments) as a branch of the zither family, a general category which includes many different stringed instruments, such as lutes, guitars, kantele, and psalteries, not just zithers.
Others view the lyre and zither as being two separate classes. Those specialists maintain that the zither is distinguished by strings spread across all or most of its soundboard, or the top surface of its sound chest, also called soundbox or resonator, as opposed to the lyre, whose strings emanate from a more or less common point off the soundboard, such as a tailpiece. Examples of that difference include a piano (a keyed zither) and a violin (referred to by some as a species of fingerboard lyre). Some specialists even argue that instruments such as the violin and guitar belong to a class apart from the lyre because they have no yokes or uprights surmounting their resonators as "true" lyres have. This group they usually refer to as the lute class, after the instrument of that name, and include within it the guitar, the violin, the banjo, and similar stringed instruments with fingerboards. Those who differ with that opinion counter by calling the lute, violin, guitar, banjo, and other such instruments "independent fingerboard lyres," as opposed to simply "fingerboard lyres" such as the Welsh crwth, which have both fingerboards and frameworks above their resonators.
One point on which organologists universally agree is that the distinction between harps on the one hand and zithers and lyres (and, in some views, lutes) on the other is that harps have strings emanating directly from the soundboard and residing in a plane that is basically perpendicular to the soundboard, as opposed to the other instruments, whose strings are attached to one or more points somewhere off the soundboard (e.g., wrest pins on a zither, tailpiece on a lyre or lute) and lie in a plane essentially parallel to it. They also agree that neither the overall size of the instrument nor the number of strings on it have anything to do with its classification. For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man (see Kinsky; also Sachs, History ..., under "References"). Regarding the number of strings, the standard 88-key piano has many more strings than even the largest harp.
Women posing as a Siren with a lyre in 1913.
A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator). Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that farthest from the player's body; as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut. They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: one was to fasten the strings to pegs which might be turned; the other was to change the place of the string upon the crossbar; probably both expedients were used simultaneously.
Statue of the Olympian deity, Apollo holding a lyre.
According to ancient Greek mythology, the young god Hermes created the lyre from a slaughtered cow from Apollo's sacred herd, using the intestines for the strings. Lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium, contrasting with the Dionysian pipes and aulos, both of which represented ecstasy and celebration.
Locales in southern Europe, western Asia, or north Africa have been proposed as the historic birthplace of the genus. The instrument is still played in north-eastern parts of Africa.
Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization.
The name kissar (kithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece.
This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times.
The number of strings on the classical lyre varied at different epochs, and possibly in different localities â four, seven and ten having been favorite numbers. They were used without a fingerboard, no Greek description or representation having ever been met with that can be construed as referring to one. Nor was a bow possible, the flat sound-board being an insuperable impediment. The plectrum, however, was in constant use. It was held in the right hand to set the upper strings in vibration; when not in use, it hung from the instrument by a ribbon. The fingers of the left hand touched the lower strings (presumably to silence those whose notes were not wanted).
There is no evidence as to the stringing of the Greek lyre in the heroic age. Plutarch says that Olympus and Terpander used but three strings to accompany their recitation. As the four strings led to seven and eight by doubling the tetrachord, so the trichord is connected with the hexachord or six-stringed lyre depicted on so many archaic Greek vases. The accuracy of this representation cannot be insisted upon, the vase painters being little mindful of the complete expression of details; yet one may suppose their tendency would be rather to imitate than to invent a number. It was their constant practice to represent the strings as being damped by the fingers of the left hand of the player, after having been struck by the plectrum which he held in the right hand. Before Greek civilization had assumed its historic form, there was likely to have been great freedom and independence of different localities in the matter of lyre stringing, which is corroborated by the antique use of the chromatic (half-tone) and enharmonic (quarter-tone) tunings pointing to an early exuberance, and perhaps also to an Asiatic bias towards refinements of intonation.
While the lyre is no longer played in modern Greece, the term lyra lives on as the name shared by various regional types of fiddles (bowed lutes) found throughout the country. There are two basic styles of lyra fiddles: 1) a pear-shaped instrument with a vaulted back which is found in the Greek islands â in particular, the Dodecanese and Crete â and the northern mainland regions of Macedonia and Thrace; and 2) an instrument with a narrow rectangular cylinder body of the Pontic Greeks who trace their roots to Pontos (Pontus), the Black Sea region of northern Turkey. (The Pontic Greek lyra is also known as kemenche.) Both types of lyra typically have three strings. They are held vertically upright and bowed horizontally; if the player is seated, the instrument's base rests on the player's upper left thigh. The Cretan lyra is traditionally played in a duo with the laouto, a long-neck fretted lute that is strummed like a guitar.
Reproduction of the lyre from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo, late 6th/early 7th century AD
Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the early Middle Ages, and one view holds that many modern stringed instruments are late-emerging examples of the lyre class. There is no clear evidence that non-Greco-Roman lyres were played exclusively with plectra, and numerous instruments regarded by some as modern lyres are played with bows.
Lyres appearing to have emerged independently of Greco-Roman prototypes were used by the Teutonic, Gallic, Scandinavian, and Celtic peoples over a thousand years ago. Dates of origin, which probably vary from region to region, cannot be determined, but the oldest known fragments of such instruments are thought to date from around the sixth century of the Common Era. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, around two centuries later, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. There came to be two broad classes of bowed European yoke lyres: those with fingerboards dividing the open space within the yoke longitudinally, and those without fingerboards. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string.
The last of the bowed yoke lyres with fingerboard was the "modern" (ca. 1485 - ca. 1800) Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work.
While the dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed yoke lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought.
In furniture design, a lyre arm is a wooden lyre-shaped element often used at the front of the arm of a chair, typically created as an exposed wooden part of a chair, sofa or other furniture piece.
A music holder used by marching bands is also called a "lyre" for its shape similar to this instrument.
Lyre also can denote the framework supporting the foot pedals underneath a piano. The term is most often used in connection with older pianos of ornate designs.
The constellation Lyra is said to resemble a lyre shape, but it looks more like a lute.
*Arabian peninsula - tanbūra
*Djibouti - tanbūra
*Egypt - kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya
*England - rote
*Estonia - talharpa
*Ethiopia - begena, dita, krar
*Finland - Jouhikko
*Greece - barbiton, kithara, lyra
*Iraq - sammu, tanbūra, zami, zinar
*Israel - kinnor
*Kenya - kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano
*Norway - Giga
*Scotland - Gue
*Somalia - tanbūra
*Sudan - kissar, tanbūra
*Tanzania - litungu
*Uganda - endongo, ntongoli
*Wales - crwth
*Yemen - tanbūra, simsimiyya
*Harp
*Levy, Michael "King David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel"; restoring the sound of the ancient Jewish Temple Lyre of the Levites
*
*Andersson, Otto. The Bowed Harp, translated and edited by Kathleen Schlesinger (London: New Temple Press, 1930).
*Bachmann, Werner. The Origins of Bowing, trans. Norma Deane (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
*Jenkins, J. "A Short Note on African Lyres in Use Today." Iraq 31 (1969), p. 103 (+ pl. XVIII).
*Kinsky, George. A History of Music in Pictures (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937).
*Sachs, Curt. The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1943).
*Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940).
|
Malay_language | Is Malay the official language of Iraq? | No | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Could Malay have originated from Sumatra island? | Yes. | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Is Malay an agglutinative language? | Yes | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Is Malay an agglutinative language? | Yes. | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | What family is Malay a member of? | Austronesian family | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | What family is Malay a member of? | Austronesian. | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | What is the basic word order in Malay? | Subject Verb Object | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | What is the basic word order in Malay? | Subject Object Verb. | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | What languages has Malay borrowed words from? | Sanskrit, Arabic and English | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | What languages has Malay borrowed words from? | Arabic, Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects, and English. | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Are there many words in Malay that use natural gender? | No | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | How are new words formed in Malay? | three methods. | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | How are new words formed in Malay? | Affixation, composition, and reduplication. | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Is Malay in the Austronesian family of languages? | Yes | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Is Malay in the Austronesian family of languages? | null | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Is Malay an agglutinative language? | Yes | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Is Malay an agglutinative language? | null | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Is there one negation word in Malay? | No | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | Is there one negation word in Malay? | null | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
Malay_language | How many parts of speech are there in Malay? | Four | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
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Malay_language | How many parts of speech are there in Malay? | null | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
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Malay_language | What is the basic word order in Malay? | Subject Verb Object | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
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Malay_language | What is the basic word order in Malay? | null | data/set5/a2 | Malay_language
Malay is a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. ethnologue.com : "Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay" " Alpha-3 Codes Arranged Alphabetically by the English Name of Language." _The Library of Congress_. 7-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. " Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages Part 2: Alpha-3 Code." _The Library of Congress_. 14-11-2006. Accessed 13-11-2007. Note: "ISO 639 provides two sets of language codes, one as a two-letter Giblin code set (639-1) and another as a three-letter code set (this part of ISO 639) for the representation of names of languages." The various forms of Malay are spoken in Brunei, Indonesia (where the national language, Indonesian, is a variety of it), Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and southern Thailand. Ethnologue report for Netherlands
Malay is the official language of Brunei and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the language is also called Bahasa Malaysia. Singapore, Brunei and southern Thailand refer to the language as Bahasa Melayu ("Malay language"). Malay is the national language of Singapore. The national language of Indonesia is Indonesian, formally referred to as Bahasa Indonesia which literally translates as "Indonesian language". It is also called Bahasa Nasional (National Language) and Bahasa Persatuan/Pemersatu (Unifying Language) in Indonesia. Indonesian is also used in East Timor, a consequence of more than 20 years of Indonesian administration and is now a "working language" of that country. Malay is the one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.[1]
There are many hypotheses as to where the Malay language originated. One of these is that it came from Sumatra island. The oldest written documents in Malay, dated from the end of the 7th century AD, were found on Bangka Island, off the southeastern coast of Sumatra and in Palembang in southern Sumatra. "Malayu" was the name of an old kingdom located in Jambi province in eastern Sumatra. It was known in ancient Chinese texts as "Mo-lo-yo" and mentioned in the Nagarakertagama, an old Javanese epic written in 1365, as one of the "tributary states" of the Majapahit kingdom in eastern Java.
The use of Malay throughout insular and peninsular Southeast Asia is linked to the rise of Muslim kingdoms and the spread of Islam, itself a consequence of growing regional trade.
Indonesia pronounced a variety of Malay its official language when it gained independence, calling it Bahasa Indonesia. However, the language had already been used as the lingua franca throughout the archipelago since the 15th century. Since 1928, nationalists and young people throughout the Indonesian archipelago declared it to be Indonesia's only official language, as proclaimed in the Sumpah Pemuda "Youth Vow." Thus Indonesia was the first country to designate it as an official language. In several parts of Indonesia, in Sumatra and Borneo Islands, Malay is spoken as local dialect of ethnic Malays.
In Malaysia, the term Bahasa Malaysia was in use until the 1990s, when most academics and government officials reverted to "Bahasa Melayu," used in the Malay version of the Federal Constitution. According to Article 152 of the Federal Constitution, Malay is the official language of Malaysia. "Bahasa Kebangsaan" (National Language) was also used at one point during the 1970s. At present day, the government is referring to the language as Bahasa Malaysia again. Similar to Malaysia in the mid 1990's, "Bahasa Melayu" was defined as Brunei's official language in the country's 1959 Constitution.
Indonesian and Malay are separated by some centuries of different vocabulary development, partly due to the influence of different colonial languages; Dutch in the case of Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies and English in the case of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, which were formerly under British rule.
Some Malay dialects, however, show only limited mutual intelligibility with the standard language; for example, Kelantanese pronunciation is difficult even for some fellow Malay speakers to understand, while Indonesian contains a lot of words unique to it that are unfamiliar to speakers of Malay (some because of javanese(bahasa Jawa)/sundanese (bahasa Sunda) or local language influences or the language have been modified by youngsters) .
The language spoken by the Peranakan (Straits Chinese, a hybrid of Chinese settlers from the Ming Dynasty and local Malays) is a unique patois of Malay and the Chinese Hokkien dialect, which is mostly spoken in the former Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca in Malaysia, and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period, Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay.
Old Malay is unintelligible to a speaker of modern Malay. It was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, the lingua franca of Hinduism and Buddhism. The earliest known inscription in the Old Malay language was found in Sumatra, written in Pallava variant of Grantha script /ref> and dates back to 7th century - known as Kedukan Bukit Inscription, it was discovered by the Dutchman M. Batenburg on 29 November 1920, at Kedukan Bukit, South Sumatra, on the banks of the River Tatang, a tributary of the River Musi. It is a small stone of 45 by 80 cm.
The Malay language came into widespread use as the trade language of the Sultanate of Malacca (1402 â 1511). During this period, the Malay language developed rapidly under the influence of Islamic literature. The development changed the nature of the language with massive infusion of Arabic, Persian and Hindi or Sanskrit vocabularies. Under the Sultanate of Malacca the language evolved into a form recognizable to speakers of modern Malay.
Malay is a member of the Austronesian family of languages which includes languages from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia. Malagasy, a geographic outlier spoken in Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, is also a member of this linguistic family.
Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the family, which includes the Languages of the Philippines and Malagasy, which is further subdivided into Outer Hesperonesian languages and Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian of which Malay is a member. Malay's closest relatives therefore include Javanese, Acehnese, Chamorro and Palauan.
Although each language of the family is mutually unintelligible, their similarities are rather striking. Many roots have come virtually unchanged from their common Austronesian ancestor. There are many cognates found in the languages' words for kinship, health, body parts and common animals. Numbers, especially, show remarkable similarities.
Malay is normally written using Latin alphabet called Rumi, although a modified Arabic script called Jawi also exists. Rumi is official in Malaysia and Singapore, and Indonesian has a different official orthography also using the Latin script. Rumi and Jawi are co-official in Brunei. Efforts are currently being undertaken to preserve Jawi script and to revive its use amongst Malays in Malaysia, and students taking Malay language examination in Malaysia have the option of answering questions using Jawi script. The Latin alphabet, however, is still the most commonly used script in Malaysia, both for official and informal purposes.
Historically, Malay has been written using various scripts. Before the introduction of Arabic script in the Malay region, Malay was written using Pallava, Kawi and Rencong script and these are still in use today by the Champa Malay in Vietnam and Cambodia. Old Malay was written using Pallava and Kawi script, as evident from several inscription stones in the Malay region. Starting from the era of kingdom of Pasai and throughout the golden age of the Sultanate of Malacca, Jawi gradually replaced these scripts as the most commonly used script in the Malay region. Starting from the 17th century, under Dutch and British influence, Jawi was gradually replaced by the Rumi script. Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Retrieved 30 August 2008.
The extent to which Malay is used in these countries varies depending on historical and cultural circumstances. Malay is the national language in Malaysia by Article 152 of the Constitution of Malaysia, and became the sole official language in West Malaysia in 1968, and in East Malaysia gradually from 1974. English continues, however, to be widely used in professional and commercial fields and in the superior courts. Other minority languages are also commonly used by the country's large ethnic minorities. The situation in Brunei is similar to that of Malaysia.
Note: this article uses the orthography of Malaysian Malay. For Indonesian orthography, see Indonesian language.
Orthographic Note:
* The combination of is represented as ngg.
There are two vowels represented by the letter "e", i.e. , and . Learners of Malay are expected to distinguish between the two sounds while learning each new word.
In some parts of Peninsular Malaysia, especially in the central and southern regions, most words which end with the letter a tend to be pronounced .
Malay is an agglutinative language, and new words are formed by three methods. New words can be created by attaching affixes onto a root word (affixation), formation of a compound word (composition), or repetition of words or portions of words (reduplication).
Root words are either nouns or verbs, which can be affixed to derive new words, e.g. masak (to cook) yields memasak (cooks, is cooking, etc.), memasakkan (cooks, is cooking for etc.), dimasak (cooked - passive) as well as pemasak (cook - person), masakan (a meal, cookery). Many initial consonants undergo mutation when prefixes are added: e.g. sapu (sweep) becomes penyapu (broom); panggil (to call) becomes memanggil (calls, is calling, etc.), tapis (sieve) becomes menapis (sieves, is sieving, etc.)
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
* ajar = teach
* ajaran = teachings
* belajar = to learn
* mengajar = to teach
* diajar = being taught (intransitive)
* diajarkan = being taught (transitive)
* mempelajari = to study
* dipelajari = being studied
* pelajar = student
* pengajar = teacher
* pelajaran = subject
* pengajaran = lesson, moral of story
* pembelajaran = learning
* terajar = taught (accidentally)
* terpelajar = well-educated
* berpelajaran = is educated
There are four types of affixes, namely prefixes (awalan), suffixes (akhiran), circumfixes (apitan) and infixes (sisipan). These affixes are categorised into noun affixes, verb affixes, and adjective affixes.
Noun affixes are affixes that form nouns upon addition to root words. The following are examples of noun affixes:
(N) and (R) indicate that if a word begins with certain letters (most often vowels or consonants k, p, s, t), the letter will either be omitted or will undergo nasal mutation or be replaced by the letter l.
Similarly, verb affixes are attached to root words to form verbs. In Malay, there are:
Adjective affixes are attached to root words to form adjectives:
In addition to these affixes, Malay also has a lot of borrowed affixes from other languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic and English. For example maha-, pasca-, eka-, bi-, anti-, pro- etc.
In Malay, new words can be formed by joining two or more root words. Compound words, when they exist freely in a sentence, are often written separately. Compound words are only attached to each other when they are bound by circumfix or when they are already considered as stable words.
For example, the word kereta which means car and api which means fire, are compounded to form a new word kereta api (train). Similarly, ambil alih (take over) is formed using the root words ambil (take) and alih (move), but will link together when a circumfix is attached to it, i.e. pengambilalihan (takeover). Certain stable words, such as kakitangan (personnel), and kerjasama (corporation), are spelled as one word even when they exist freely in sentences.
There are four types of words reduplication in Malay, namely
* Full reduplication
* Partial reduplication
* Rhythmic reduplication
* Reduplication of meaning
Another distinguishing feature of Malay (include Indonesian Malay) is its use of measure words (penjodoh bilangan). In this way, it is similar to many other languages of Asia, including Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Bengali.
Measure words are similar to the English two head of cattle or a sheet of paper. Examples are :
In Malay, there are 4 parts of speech:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Function words
There are 16 types of function words in Malay which perform a grammatical function in a sentence. /ref> Amongst these are conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, negations and determiners.
There are two negation words in Malay (include Indonesian Malay), that is bukan and tidak. Bukan is used to negate noun phrases and prepositions in a predicate, whereas tidak is used to negate verbs and adjectives phrases in a predicate.
The negative word bukan however, can be used before verb phrases and adjective phrases if the sentence shows contradictions.
Malay does not make use of grammatical gender, and there are only a few words that use natural gender; the same word is used for he and she or for his and her. Most of the words that refer to people (family terms, professions, etc.) have a form that does not distinguish between the sexes. For example, adik can both refer to a younger sibling of either sex. In order to specify the natural gender of a noun, an adjective has to be added: adik laki-laki corresponds to "brother" but really means "male younger sibling". There are some words that are gendered, for instance puteri means "princess", and putera means "prince"; words like these are usually absorbed from other languages (in these cases, from Sanskrit).
There is no grammatical plural in Malay. Plurality is expressed by the context, or the usage of words expressing plurality, and by reduplication when needed. However, reduplication has most of the time many other functions and meanings.
Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active and passive voices or intentional and accidental moods. Some of these affixes are ignored in daily conversations.
The basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and possessive pronouns follow the noun they modify.
The Malay language has many words borrowed from Arabic (mainly religious terms), Sanskrit, Tamil, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently, English (in particular many scientific and technological terms).
In Malaysia and Indonesia, to greet somebody with "Selamat pagi" or "Selamat sejahtera" would be considered very formal, and the borrowed word "Hi" would be more usual among friends; similarly "Bye-bye" is often used when taking one's leave.
Contemporary usage of Malay includes a set of slang words, formed by innovations of standard Malay words or incorporated from other languages, spoken by the urban speech community, which may not be familiar to the older generation, e.g. awek/cewek (girl); balak/cowok (guy); gak/nggak(tidak); no usha (survey); skodeng (peep); cun (pretty); poyo/slenge (horrible, low-quality) etc. New plural pronouns have also been formed out of the original pronouns and the word orang ("people"), i.e. kitorang (kita + orang, the exclusive "we", in place of kami); korang (kau + orang, "you"); diorang or derang (dia + orang, "they").
The Malay-speaking community, especially in Kuala Lumpur, also code-switch between English and Malay in their speech, forming Bahasa Rojak. Examples of the borrowings are: Bestlah tempat ni (This place is cool);kau ni terror lah (How daring you are; you're fabulous). Consequently, this phenomenon has raised the displeasure of language purists in Malaysia, in their effort to uphold the proper use of the national language.
The following are some contractions used by Malay-speaking youths:
* The list of Malay words and list of words of Malay origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project
* Differences between Malay and Indonesian
* Indonesian language
* Jawi, an adapted Arabic alphabet for Malay
* Language politics
* List of English words of Malay origin
* Malay-based creole languages
* Malaysian English, English language used formally in Malaysia.
* Manado Malay
* Minangkabau language
* Rojak language
* Swadesh list of Malay words
* Varieties of Malay
* The Extent of the Influence of Tamil on the Malay Language: A Comparative Study - Dr. T.Wignesan(This paper was given at the VIIIth World Tamil Studies Congress, held in the Tamil University in Tanjavur, India, on December-January 1994-95 Now published in the critical collection: T.Wignesan. Sporadic Striving amid Echoed Voices, Mirrored Images & Stereotypic Posturing in Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, xix-244p.)
* Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature Malaysia, in Malay only)
* Ethnologue report for Malay
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (Dr Bhanot's)
* Malay - English Online Dictionary (from Malay to English only) from Webster's Dictionary
* Malay - English - Chinese Online Dictionary (cari.com.my)
* Online Malay Text-to-Speech Demo
* The Malay Spelling Reform, Asmah Haji Omar, (Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society, 1989-2 pp. 9â13 later designated J11)
|
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