After the sharp and drastic decline of the tin-mining industry as well as the economic recession in the mid-1980s, Malaysians living in, or originating from, Perak's Kinta Valley once worried that their towns and villages would become 'ghostly' and be forgotten.

The anxiety was compounded by the opening - in the early 1990s - of the North-South Highway which bypasses the entire Kinta Valley.

Indeed, from the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the Ipoh-centred Kinta Valley witnessed a massive exodus of its working-class youths. The population of many surrounding Chinese-predominated townships and new villages were reduced significantly, leaving behind a disproportionately high number of senior citizens and their young grandchildren.

The youths sought jobs in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, Japan and Taiwan. Before most of them returned to Malaysia from overseas in the mid-and late 1990s, they had already remitted millions of ringgit back home and rejuvenated their hometowns and villages with renovated houses, markets and schools as well as new cars and motorcycles.

Many of them also brought back new business ideas from foreign countries as they invested their hard-earned money in fashionable boutiques, furniture retail shops, hair-dressing salons, discotheques, coffee houses, restaurants and video cassette rental shops, etc with Western, Japanese or Taiwanese interior decorations. Some have now become middle-aged and successful entrepreneurs in their hometowns and villages in the Kinta Valley or Kuala Lumpur.

The North-South Highway has, paradoxically, proven to be a blessing in disguise: for those who now work or do businesses in Kuala Lumpur, they can now go back to their hometowns or villages in the Kinta Valley once a week or every month to spend a weekend or two with their parents or grandparents. For the time of travelling has since been cut down to three hours at the maximum. And the highway is always smooth, except on the eve of Chinese New Year.

In short, life has revived in the Kinta Valley. Relative prosperity has returned.

However, for a while, it was felt by many elderly generations of Kinta Valley that their wealthier or more educated children and grandchildren should also know something about the unique history of their birthplace which distinguishes itself from other parts of Malaysia by relative cleanliness, orderliness and equanimity, conspicuously popular passion for horse-racing, widespread use of the English language and apparently more harmonious inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations.

Politically unique

Indeed, Ipoh and the Kinta Valley are also politically unique: in the 1960s and 1970s, for poorer Malay, Indian or even Ceylonese candidates from the opposition parties like the People's Progressive Party (PAP) and Democratic Action Party (DAP) could easily win local, state and parliamentary elections with the overwhelming support from the Chinese-predominated voters against their wealthier Chinese opponents from the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA).

DR Seenivasagam the then opposition PPP candidate is still fondly remembered and respected by many elderly Chinese in the Kinta Valley as a champion of the underdogs, irrespective of race or religion, in courts, the Parliament and Ipoh Municipal Council. His funeral in 1969 was attended by thousands of weeping Malays, Chinese, Indians, Ceylonese and Eurasians forming a three-mile long procession.

The other time such a spontaneous social honour was given was on June 4, 1949 to Madam Sybil Kartigasu, a Eurasian Catholic housewife who died as the result of brutal torture by the Japanese secret military police between July 1943 and August 1945. Some older generation of Kinta Valley's residents in their 80s or 90s can still vividly remember a sea of people of all races gathering in the Chinese-predominated Ipoh to bid a final farewell to their heroine and saviour.

To this day, a street in Ipoh is still named after her in memory and honour of the simple housewife who during the Japanese Occupation secretly listened to the BBC World News broadcast in short-wave radios, discreetly spread morale-boosting messages to a frightened, depressed and downtrodden people and, above all, supplied life-saving medicines and medical services to a Papan-based unit of the 5th Independent Regiment of the underground Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA).

The legend of Sybil Kartigasu, as well as all the other ancient, modern and contemporary parts of the history of Kinta Valley, is now meticulously documented, complied, narrated and in depth as well as width - into a 384-page hardcover book by historians Khoo Salma Nasution and Abdur-Razzaq Lubis, with a morally instructive preface penned by Professor Wang Gangwu who spent his childhood in Ipoh during the Japanese Occupation. Wang is now the Director of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.

In the fact-based narrative of Khoo and Abdur-Razzaq in Kinta Valley Pioneering Malaysia's Modern Development (Ipoh, Perak Academy, 2005) , the known history of the Kinta Velley began, somewhat surprisingly to many people, with the Orang Asli and Hindu as well as Buddhists from ancient India. They have archaeological findings to support their point of departure. However, the narrative of that period is brief.

What follows in the book is another period that began when the Portuguese who, after arriving in the 16th century, found that the Kinta Valley was populated by Malays who paid tributes to the Malaccan Sultanate. The ensuing narratives are familiar: the Portuguese was replaced by the Dutch and then British, as well as the successive waves of the influx of Chinese and Indians.

Japanese occupation

However, unlike other general history textbooks, whether local or foreign, the narratives and facts complied are detailed and supplemented by many rare photographs of people and things. The themes covered are also comprehensive ranging from British colonial policies, crime rates, prostitution, education, economic development, social transformation and, above all, political changes.

As this year is the 60th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War and the liberation of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, Section Six (pp. 273 296) of Kinta Valley Pioneering Malaysia's Modern Development should be of particular interest to its readers. It recalls in detail the Japanese arrival and occupation of the Kinta Valley, how lives were changed for ordinary people as well as the underground resistance movement which has by now been recognised by most war historians in Malaysia, Singapore and Britain to be most active and organised as well as numerically the strongest.

It was, for example, in the Kinta Valley that surviving veteran communists like Abdullah CD, Chin Ping, Rashid Maidin and Eng Meng Ching @ Yin Min Ch'ing joined the communist underground resistance after the scandalous and ignominious failure of British defence.

Eng, like the non-communist Eurasian Catholic Sybil Kartigasu, was also detained and brutally tortured by the Japanese secret military police. But, unlike Kartigasu, she survived, seconded after the war by the party to work briefly with the British Military Administration (BMA) in Ipoh, then took up arms again from June 1948, went to China in exile, married another communist Abdullah CD and has since become Suriani Abdullah.

It was also in the Kinta Valley that Chin Peng's mentor Du Lung San @ Tu Lung San as well as Singapore's war hero Lim Bo Seng were martyred during the Occupation. A street in Ipoh is still named after Lim Bo Seng to his honour and memory as Singapore's Pacific War museum at Fort Siloso has publicly recognised the contribution of the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army in the resistance by dedicating a memorial section in its exhibition hall.

However, this section has missed out a no less thrilling episode of how the communists and some Chinese secret agents of the British Force 136 operated clandestinely during the Occupation - in the area centred on the Tong Ah Hotel at the junction of the Anderson Road (now Jalan Muda Aziz) and Clare Street (now Jalam Mustapha Al Bakri). For this lacuna, one has to fill with Tan Chong Tee's Story of a WWII Resistance Fighter Force 136 (Singapore, Asiapac, 2001) whose real-life personal experience was also Kinta Valley-centred.

In the subsequent chapter on the 'Emergency' (pp. 297-318), the book Kinta Valley Pioneering Malaysia's Modern Development still takes perhaps unwisely from a standpoint of effecting national reconciliation in the words and spirit of the 1989 Haadyai Peace Accord - a colonialist or previously official line of referring the communists as 'terrorists' or 'CTs' indiscriminately. However, it has also taken into account some facts offered by Chin Peng in his memoirs published in Singapore in 2003.

On the whole, Kinta Valley Pioneering Malaysia's Modern Development is a remarkably well researched history of the Kinta Valley which should interest all those who wish to discover for the first time or re-discover the colourful past of their hometowns, villages and streets in Ipoh, Batu Gajah, Chemor, Gopeng, Kampar, Kota Baru and Malim Nawar, Kuala Dipang and Sungai Siput, Lahat and Pengkalan Pegoh, Mengelembu, Papan, Pusing and Siputeh, Sungai Raia and Kampong Kepayang, Tambun and Ampang, Tanjong Rambutan, Tanjong Tualang and Tronoh.

It is also a history book for all ethnic communities from all social classes not only in the Kinta Valley but also Malaysia as well as Singapore who may be interested to trace the evolution of our multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural societies in all its ups and downs as well as twists and turns.