Papan

Papan was a timber town before it was a tin town. Its name is the Malay word for plank, and the chengal logged upriver at Ulu Johan came down the Kinta tributary to Pengkalan Pegoh. It was cut here for boats, houses and furniture. And when Kinta Valley’s tin rush came the town filled fast. By 1887 Papan had a market, a police station, a magistrate’s office, a prison, post offices, schools, temples and a Chinese opera theatre.

The Mandailing shaped it. Raja Asal founded the settlement, and his nephew Raja Bilah was made penghulu in 1882. Two of the houses they left are still standing: Rumah Asal, built in 1882, and the Rumah Besar, the great house a Mandailing would call a bagas godang, built for a leader in the style of the Sumatran homeland.

Ipoh overtook Papan by 1892, and with the collapse of the tin price in the mid-1980s the town started to shrink as many towns did. Around 30 people live in the old shophouses along Jalan Besar today, with a few hundred more in the wooden houses behind them (number unconfirmed). The row is half ruin and half lived-in, and that is exactly what makes the town one of our favourites.

In 1985 the Kledang Range behind the town was chosen as a dump for radioactive waste from the Asian Rare Earth plant at Bukit Merah. That May, 6,700 residents of Papan and the towns around it signed a protest letter, and thousands demonstrated that July.