The quiet, seaside city of Malacca, about 150 kilometers to the south, is the guardian charged with the reflective task of preserving its past. Five hundred years ago, an extraordinary empire rose and fell here, its power and dreams suddenly caught off-guard by the dawn of the Colonial Era.

Sloping rooftops of traditional Malay houses still hang over the water, and seem to call out sleepily from the past. The riverside is a part of the city that seems to have defied the Portuguese, who captured the city in 1511 and occupied it for well over a century. 

The Portuguese influence is visible in the city's architecture. As they did in other colonies, they taxed buildings relative to their width, a policy that accounts for the deceptively thin facades along the colonial streets. A building no more than twelve feet across can easily extend backwards two hundred feet, its hidden interior a linear succession of high-ceilinged rooms and courtyards

On the streets themselves, however, it is the Chinese influence that is felt most. As they have done for hundreds of years, Chinese merchants advertise the wares inside their shop houses with bright red characters. Open-air fruit, vegetable, and fish markets sing with cadences of people bargaining in Mandarin. On the edge of the city is the largest Chinese graveyard outside of China itself, a sprawling zone of fields, trees, and uterus-shaped tombstones.

Over the centuries, the Chinese and local Malay cultures in Malacca intertwined, eventually producing a completey unique society, the Baba-Nyonya.