265 x 207 mm (mounted on card). A view looking down onto the Klang River and across to Welds Hill (still at this period heavily wooded) with a sprinkling of Malay houses with atap roofs clustered around the river. The area in the foreground was later to be the site of the Government Offices and cricket ground. The view looks eastward from a point a little to the south of the confluence of the Klang and Gombah Rivers. The photograph dates from the period just after the British centre of administration in Selangor had been transferred to Kuala Lumpur, and Chinese power in the town was on the wane. Chinese tin mining in inland Selangor had started in the Kanching area in the later 1840s and the first exports of tin from Ampang in 1859 led to the setting up of a trading settlement on the site of present day Kuala Lumpur. From 1868 until his death in 1885, Yap Ah Loy was Capitan China or headman, and the settlement was largely under his control during the turbulent period leadin gup to the formal British assumption of control in the state. J.G. Davidson was appointed British Resident in 1874 with headquarters at Klang and in the following year British police were established at Kuala Lumpur. The civil wars and a fall in the price of tin on world markets had drained Yap Ah Loys resources in the early 1870s but in a boom in prices in 1879 restored Kuala Lumpur's importance and the British Resident moved permanently to the growing town in 1880.