The Portuguese razed Malacca's original sultanate palace in 1511, but the city's Peranakan shophouses, Dutch administrative buildings, and Straits-born trade networks survived five centuries of colonial handovers intact. Today the two-square-kilometre heritage core holds more gazetted monuments per block than any Malaysian city outside Georgetown — a density that earned UNESCO World Heritage designation in 2008. Malacca city tour from Kuala Lumpur itineraries converge on Stadthuys Square, where the 1650 Dutch administrative complex anchors a district of terracotta civic buildings that once housed the colonial governor, courts, and treasury. The adjacent Christ Church, completed in 1753, retains its hand-hewn ceiling beams and floor tombstones marking two centuries of Protestant burials. Across the square, the History and Ethnography Museum occupies the former Stadthuys itself, displaying Malay sultanic regalia, Portuguese naval charts, and Chinese porcelain recovered from South China Sea wrecks — entry requires the standard 10 MYR conservation fee. One kilometre east, Jonker Street bisects the Peranakan quarter where Straits Chinese merchants built ornate shophouses with carved teak doors and ceramic tile facades imported from Guangdong kilns. The street's 300-metre stretch now functions as an antiques corridor and weekend night market, but the architecture remains unaltered since the 1920s. Behind these shophouses, the Malacca River curves through the old port district — its wharves silent since container shipping moved to Port Klang in the 1970s, but riverboats still run scheduled cruises past colonial warehouses and waterfront murals. St Paul's Hill rises 60 metres above the riverfront, crowned by the roofless stone shell of a 1521 Portuguese chapel where Francis Xavier's body lay in state for nine months before transfer to Goa. The adjacent A Famosa gate — a single bastion arch — is all that survives of the fortress complex the Dutch demolished in 1806. From the hilltop, sightlines sweep across the Strait of Malacca, the shipping lane that funnelled nutmeg, silk, and sandalwood through this entrepôt for four centuries before steam navigation redirected trade to Singapore in 1819.