Echoes of empire still ring through these historic Asian towns.
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Gangtok, Sikkim, India
Gangtok sits at 1650 metres amid the eastern Himalayan foothills, looking more like a Raj-era hill station than an Indian state capital. Jumbled bazaars and apartments cascade from a ridge crowned by a Tibetan-style temple and the modest palace of Sikkim's former ruler, the Chogyal. As a 7100-square-kilometre, Buddhist Shangri-la that was never quite part of British India, the fledgling nation evaded entanglement in Mother India's sari at independence. In 1973, however, the Chogyal sought Delhi's protection against his own disgruntled subjects and, not unlike the Chinese in neighbouring Tibet, the fervently anti-colonial Indians arrived to establish their own colony. Sikkim soon became an Indian state and its three-century-old monarchy expired. Gangtok today is a temperate, uncrowded town of 100,000 people whose steep, tiered streets connect by switchbacks and stairways, while the Chogyal's old palace looks down on it all, echoing a quixotic dream of national independence.
George Town, Penang, Malaysia
Captain Francis Light once fired a blast of silver coins into the Penang scrub to motivate his workers to clear the land. It worked and the island (off north-west Malaysia) soon became a British East India Company trading post. The colonials are long gone – a kiss-off from Noel Coward described their Malaya as "a first-rate country for second-rate people" – but history lives on in Penang's capital, George Town. With its Chinese, Indian and Malay heritage, the UNESCO-listed town is rich with colonnaded shophouses, temples and bazaars. For starters, see Little India, the Eastern & Oriental Hotel and the Khoo Kongsi clan house, and then quench your thirst at the Tan family's Hong Kong Bar on Chulia Street, as generations of travellers and Australian servicemen before you have done.
See tourismpenang.net.my.
Luang Prabang, Laos
The mighty Mekong runs through it but just decades ago Luang Prabang still slumbered between the age of the rickshaw and a Cold War communist hangover. This former capital of the Lao royals received World Heritage protection in 1998, in time to head off the dubious "progress" that mass tourism and fast bucks otherwise might have wreaked upon it. The town is encrusted with more than 30 golden temples and marigold-robed Buddhist monks still drift through its streets at dawn, but these days they also pass boutique hotels, cafes and good restaurants housed in refurbished French colonial buildings. Hike up Phu Si ("Sacred Hill") at sunset to see the roofs of temples, like 450-year-old Wat Xieng Thong, glittering against the Mekong tides.
See tourismlaos.org.
Phuket Town, Thailand
In the 1970s Phuket Island was a boondock Thai province of tapioca farms and worked-out tin quarries. Since then the country's largest island has boomed as a mecca for more than 12 million annual visitors, with its west coast beaches now overshadowing the traditional east coast capital, Phuket Town. The old town's restored shophouses and Sino-Portuguese mansions tell their own story, of a time when tin and trading were king here rather than sunburn, resorts and beer bars. Old Phuket Town has been aptly described as "a casserole of cultures with a very Thai taste". To sample them, just stroll Yaowarat and Dibuk roads, now alive with cafes, art galleries and Hokkien food delicacies. Sticky-beak through imposing fences at 19th century mansions, or visit the open ones such as beautiful Baan Chinpracha and Thai Hua Museum (both on Krabi Road) or the nearby Blue Elephant Restaurant in the former Governor's mansion.
Yangon, Myanmar
"It is the fairest place, as I suppose, that is in the world," wrote an English traveller in 1586 when he first saw the grand, golden spindle of Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda. The aura of Burmese Buddhism's equivalent of Fort Knox hasn't faded one lumen but there is much more to Myanmar's capital than its celebrated, 99-metre, diamond-tipped stupa. Downtown Yangon-Rangoon still has swathes of gloriously decrepit colonial architecture, much of it tragically left to decay by xenophobe generals, although several gems are now being re-booted as fine hotels. Rudyard Kipling, author of the famous poem Mandalay, is much evoked here at the likes of the Governor's Residence hotel's Kipling Bar and the Strand Hotel (where he possibly never stayed), even though his stay in Rangoon was "countable by hours". Similarly he neither sailed the Irrawaddy nor visited Mandalay. Do we mind?
Kuching, Sarawak, East Malaysia
The three Rajah Brookes, the "White Rajahs of Borneo", held sway in Sarawak from 1841 to 1946 as the only resident European dynasty ever to rule in Asia. They dotted their capital, Kuching, with architectural eccentricities like the Round Tower, the Square Tower and the Pavilion. Start walking and you soon find them, as well as Kuek Seng Ong temple and the elegant Court House complex built by the second Rajah, Sir Charles Brooke. Across the river, The Astana, a pocket palace constructed by Sir Charles for his new Ranee, is today the official residence of the Governor of Sarawak. Meanwhile, the Kuching Muzium displays a 20-centimetre hairball that was found inside a Borneo rhino with a human dental plate embedded in it. Nothing is known of the denture's owner (or loser), who presumably became extinct at around the same time as Borneo's rhinos and its Rajahs.