Taiping Market Mural

The Taiping Market Mural is located along the outer wall of the Taiping Municipal Gallery, close to the intersection of Jalan Istana Larut (formerly Swettenham Road) and Jalan Stesen (formerly Station Road).

The mural commemorates the Taiping Market, one of the oldest wooden architecture 19th-century buildings in Malaysia. The foreground of the mural depicts a Malay businessman riding a bullock cart facing an English businessman on a horse carriage, at a road intersection with the Taipng Market in the background. The mural brilliantly depicts the meeting of two cultures, as well as the Malay States’ and Malay Sultanates’ feudal subsistence economy coming face to face with Western capitalism, at a time of great change in the political and economic landscape of Perak.

The mural has suffered some minor vandalism at the hands of graffiti artists, with the graffiti being unsurprising painted over the Englishman’s carriage, a clear sign of the disdain the youth of today has towards our history of British imperial colonisation.