Lin­ger­ing like the ghosts of the last colo­nial mas­ters but two
          are their descen­dants in Por­tuguese Square.
Lin­ger­ing like the ghosts of the last colo­nial mas­ters but two
          they’re unsure of what they should do ;
              they don’t even know why they’re there,
except to put a for­eign pres­ence on view.
Lin­ger­ing like the ghosts of the last colo­nial mas­ters but two
          are their descen­dants in Por­tuguese Square.

 

Por­tuguese Square in Mela­ka (Malac­ca) is a weird­ly human memen­to to the orig­i­nal colonists of this part of Malaysia. The Por­tuguese, who seized the port in 1511, were oust­ed by the Dutch in the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry. In turn, the Dutch made way in 1824 for the British to add the colony as the third of the ‘Straits Set­tle­ments’. Penang, Sin­ga­pore and Malac­ca and the ‘Malay States’ were formed into the Fed­er­a­tion of Malaya from 1895until Inde­pen­dence (‘Mer­da­ka’) in 1957.

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