In Malacca, beside a large reconstruction of the palace of its kings, housed in the old British Club where Somerset Maugham set his short story ‘Footprints in the jungle’, is an exhibition of over 500 years of Malaysian history. It portrays old Melaka as the centre of a great maritime Malay Islamic civilisation, and charts the town's place in the unfolding story of a nation. In the years before independence, colonial Malacca had declined into something of a backwater. Yet it was still of immense symbolic significance for Malayan nationalists. It was at a Malay Nationalist Party conference in Malacca in the heady year 1945 that the radical, Dr Burhanuddin Al-Helmy, one of Malay nationalism's most important ideologues, declaimed the famous pantun:

It was here in early 1956 that Tunku Abdul Rahman announced the date for the transfer of power: 31 August 1957. His partner in independence, the leader of the Malayan Chinese Tan Cheng Lock, was the quintessential man of Malacca. The town today has been designated a bandaraya bersejarah, a living museum: its architecture, its tableaux, the tombs of its heroes have become symbolic of many of the foundation myths of modern Malaysia. The ‘soul of independence’ has been envisaged in many different ways.