Things to do in Penang: all 34 attractions

Francis Light claimed Penang for the East India Company on this spot, and the stockade he threw up was rebuilt in brick by convict labour two decades later. For all its star-shaped ramparts the fort never fired a shot in anger - the seaward attack it was built for never came. Its prize gun, the Seri Rambai, was cast by the Dutch, given to Johor and seized by pirates before ending up here; women still leave flowers at the barrel praying for children.

Cheong Fatt Tze reached Southeast Asia penniless and died one of its wealthiest men, appointed consul by both the Qing court and the Dutch. He willed that the house stay in family hands until his last son died, which left it slowly rotting as a subdivided tenement for most of a century. Conservationists bought it in the late 1980s and the restoration went on to win a UNESCO heritage award - the rescue that convinced Penang its shophouses were worth keeping.

The Khoo clan finished their first grand hall here in the 1890s and it burned down almost immediately. Clan lore holds that the roof was struck by lightning because the building was extravagant enough to insult the emperor, so the replacement was deliberately made humbler - which is difficult to credit standing under it. The carvers, and much of the stone, came from Fujian.

The street is named for Armenian merchants who traded here in the 1800s, and number 120 was the base from which Sun Yat Sen raised money and planned the 1911 uprising that ended imperial China. Its second life began in 2012, when Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic painted a few murals for the George Town Festival. "Kids on Bicycle" was never meant to be permanent and is now the most photographed wall in Malaysia.

This was the home of Chung Keng Quee, a Hakka tin magnate who was also a secret-society chief and a broker in the Larut Wars that pulled the British into Perak. The house sets Chinese carpentry against Scottish cast iron and English floor tiles, which is precisely the hybrid taste of the Straits Chinese who paid for it. Its thousand-odd objects show how the Baba-Nyonya actually lived rather than how a museum imagines they did.

Tamil Muslim traders built the first mosque here at the turn of the 19th century, on land the East India Company granted to their community. "Kapitan Keling" was a colonial job title rather than a name: Cauder Mohudeen was the headman the British recognised as speaking for Penang's Indian Muslims. The Mughal domes and lone minaret are a later rebuilding, because the mosque was enlarged every time the congregation was.

The oldest Anglican church in Southeast Asia was raised by convict labour, its Greek Revival portico a piece of Georgian England set down in the tropics. Japanese shelling and wartime looting left it close to a shell. It was patched back together after 1945 and now stands a few minutes' walk from a Chinese clan temple, an Indian mosque and a Hindu temple - the whole argument for George Town in four streets.

Chinese dock workers arriving from Fujian could not buy land, so they built out over the water instead, each jetty settled by families sharing a single surname. Chew Jetty is the largest of the few that survive; others were cleared for development without much ceremony. UNESCO listing in 2008 turned a settlement the city had written off into part of the reason it is now protected.

Indian traders were established here within a few years of the settlement being founded, and the blocks around Market and Queen Streets have been doing the same business ever since - textiles, gold, spices, garlands. The name is a modern label on a very old trade. Much of it still runs through family firms holding shopfronts their great-grandfathers opened.

Penang's Siamese community received this land by royal grant in 1845, when the island's Thai population was large enough to want a temple of its own. The 33-metre reclining Buddha inside is among the longest anywhere, and the naga-flanked entrance is unmistakably Thai work. A Burmese temple faces it directly across the road, which tells you most of what you need to know about the street.

A monk named Beow Lean began the Temple of Supreme Bliss on this hillside in 1890, and it has essentially never stopped being built since. The seven-tier Pagoda of Ten Thousand Buddhas, completed in 1930, stacks Chinese, Thai and Burmese storeys on top of one another because donors from all three traditions funded it. The bronze Kuan Yin above came much later, and the whole complex still runs largely on small donations.

Built around 1850 for Chor Soo Kong, a monk remembered as a healer, and by local account the pit vipers arrived on their own once it was finished. They were read as a blessing and never removed. There are far fewer now than a century ago, which has more to do with Bayan Lepas being built up around the temple than with anything inside it.

A small chapel went up here in the 1840s, and the annual St Anne's Feast has grown into one of the largest Catholic pilgrimages in Southeast Asia, drawing crowds into six figures to a town of very modest size. The original church still stands beside the vast modern one finished in 2002. Pilgrims arrive regardless of denomination, which is a very Malaysian detail.

The British went uphill to escape the heat almost immediately - Francis Light kept a bungalow here, and later officials ran a small hill station with strawberry beds. For over a century the only way up was on foot or in a sedan chair carried by porters, until the funicular opened in 1923 after an earlier attempt failed outright. The Swiss-built cars installed in 2011 now do the climb in minutes.

The newest attraction on the hill occupies some of its oldest forest. Opened in 2016, it threads a walking trail and a canopy bridge through standing rainforest instead of clearing it, which is why the wildlife stayed. It is the easiest place on the island to see dusky langurs and giant black squirrels without committing to a jungle trek.

The gardens were laid out in 1884 in a worked-out granite quarry, which is why a waterfall runs through them and why locals still call them the Waterfall Gardens. Charles Curtis, the first superintendent, spent years turning colonial plant-collecting into something that functioned as a garden. The long-tailed macaques were not part of his plan.

Gazetted in 2003, this is the smallest national park in Malaysia and one of very few anywhere you can walk across in a morning. It had been a forest reserve long before that, which is the only reason a coastline this close to a city of a million people still has nesting turtles and undisturbed beaches. Everything inside is reached by trail or boat - there is no road in.

The macaques are the obvious residents, but the older landmark is up the headland behind: Muka Head lighthouse, built in 1883 to bring shipping into the northern channel and still working. Fishermen were running boats to this bay long before anyone came to swim. Reaching it is an hour of jungle path from Teluk Bahang, or ten minutes if you pay a boatman.

Behind the sand lies a meromictic lake - a rare formation where fresh water sits on top of seawater in layers that barely mix, and one that here appears and drains seasonally. The beach is also a green turtle nesting site with a hatchery that has run for decades. The only access is a jungle trail or a boat, which is precisely why the turtles still come ashore.

The name means Foreigner's Rock, and "ferringhi" descends from the same Persian and Arabic root that gave the Malay world its word for European - a reminder that Portuguese ships worked these waters long before the British arrived. It stayed a fishing village until the 1970s, when the hotel strip went up along the sand. The night market still runs the length of the road.

Spice was the whole commercial point of early colonial Penang: nutmeg, clove and pepper made fortunes here before rubber and tin displaced them. This garden, opened in 2003 on an abandoned rubber estate, replants that history across a steep patch of hillside. Most of the exhibits are things already sitting in your kitchen.

Frog Hill is less a hill than what remains after one was dug away - clay and laterite pits, worked for brick earth, that filled with groundwater once the excavators left. The turquoise water is dissolved minerals rather than a sign of health. It is an entirely accidental landscape, unmarked and unmanaged, and that is most of the appeal.

Penang's largest reservoir was built in the 1980s to loosen the state's dependence on the Muda river for drinking water. An expansion completed in 2017 raised the dam wall and roughly tripled what it holds - an unglamorous piece of engineering that matters more to Penang than most of its landmarks. The perimeter road has since become a popular early-morning run.

The road is named after Sir Henry Gurney, the British High Commissioner killed in an ambush in 1951 during the Emergency. The seafront it follows is reclaimed land, and the hawker trade that made the name famous grew up along the promenade. Further reclamation has since pushed the actual sea some distance off, which locals have never entirely forgiven.

Chulia Street is named for the Chulias, Tamil Muslim traders from the Coromandel coast who were among the settlement's earliest and most powerful merchants. It has been a place to eat cheaply and late for as long as it has had lodging houses, and it still fills with stalls after dark. Backpackers turned up in the 1970s and simply joined a much older pattern.

Lorong Baru is an ordinary residential street that empties of cars each evening and fills with stalls instead - char koay kak, ice kacang, ngo hiang. It has no colonial pedigree and nothing listed on it, which is part of why locals rate it above the stops on the tour-bus circuit. Several stalls are now on their second or third generation of the same family.

The market sits at the foot of the road climbing to Kek Lok Si, and the laksa stall here has been ladling out the same sour fish broth since the 1950s. Asam laksa is Penang's own version - tamarind-sour rather than coconut-rich - and it is reliably not what visitors from Kuala Lumpur are expecting. The queue is the recommendation.

Lebuh Kimberley is named after a Victorian colonial secretary, which has nothing to do with why anyone comes. This is one of the densest concentrations of Hokkien street food in the city - koay chap, duck kway chap, chee cheong fun - much of it from carts that have held the same few metres of pavement for decades. Most open late afternoon and sell out.

Opened in 2012 on old plantation land at Teluk Bahang, ESCAPE deliberately went low-tech - rope courses, slides and climbing instead of big steel rides. A water park followed, and its longest slide has held a Guinness world record. The whole pitch is that children should be doing things rather than queueing for them.

This opened in 1986 as the Penang Butterfly Farm, among the first of its kind anywhere, and was rebuilt and relaunched as Entopia in 2016. Behind the free-flight dome sits a working breeding and research operation rather than just a display. Its consistent interest has been the insects nobody else bothers to keep.

KOMTAR was Penang's great modernist bet: begun in the 1970s to pull government and commerce into a single 65-storey tower, it topped out in 1985 as the tallest building in Malaysia and remains the tallest in Penang at 249 metres. The observation deck and the glass Rainbow Skywalk opened in 2016 and gave the tower a second life. It is also the building that answers if you click the tallest tower on the map above.

The British cut a fort into this hilltop at Batu Maung in the 1930s, siting coastal guns to cover the southern approach to the island. It was lost within days in December 1941 because the invasion arrived overland from the north instead, and the Japanese then used the site as a garrison and an execution ground. It was left to the jungle for fifty years before opening as a museum in 2002.

Malaysia's first bird park opened in Seberang Perai in 1988, on the mainland side of the state that visitors routinely skip. Its walk-through aviaries were an unusual idea at the time, when most collections still kept everything in small cages. It remains one of the few attractions here built for the mainland's own residents rather than for tourists.

Queensbay opened in 2006 on reclaimed land at Bayan Lepas, next door to the free industrial zone whose engineers and factory workers fill it at weekends. It is the largest mall in Penang by floor area, and the seafront edge is its one genuinely good feature. Its existence is a plain read on where the island's money now comes from: electronics, not spice.