Jalan Berek Is Still Open for Business

Jalan Berek 还在营业

An old-town street can look finished in a photograph. The people trading along it have rather more to do.

老街拍起来像一张完成的照片，街上做生意的人却还有许多事要忙。

Photographing Jalan Berek is easy. Stand across the road, wait for a gap in traffic and frame the old shophouses. The troublesome part begins when the photograph is finished. These are not just façades arranged for visitors. A town still has to do its shopping behind them.

Jalan Berek, also known as Barrack Road, has been part of Taiping's commercial life for generations. Rows of narrow-fronted shophouses make a handsome street picture. Yet the doors matter more than the symmetry. A closed door gives a tourist an old building. An open one gives someone a place to work, buy something or ask a question.

In 2023, Taiping's municipal council promoted the Jalan Berek Cultural Trail, with traditional crafts, food, performances and small businesses among the attractions described in local coverage. It followed preservation efforts begun earlier. A festival can invite people to notice a street, but the ordinary shopkeeper must deal with the less photogenic days after the stalls have been packed away.

Another report described shade trees planted along Jalan Berek as part of the improvement effort. Trees are a wonderfully unceremonious form of heritage work. They do not explain who built the road, and nobody puts a ribbon around their shadows. They simply make a walk more bearable when the sun is doing its best to shorten it.

One address on Jalan Berek has a particularly long memory. Reporting in 2023 traced an 1884 townhouse to the former home and office of Kapitan China Chung Keng Quee, with its later owner seeking to conserve it. A home and an office under one roof feels less exotic when we remember how many people still conduct their lives around a shop counter. The difficulty is not imagining the old use. It is keeping an old building useful without sanding away everything that makes it interesting.

A heritage trail can tell visitors where to point the camera. It cannot tell them whether a trader has had enough customers this week, whether repairs are affordable or whether the younger generation wants the keys. Those decisions belong to people, not to the trail map. The polished version of a street leaves them outside the frame.

Go to Jalan Berek for the old buildings, by all means. Then notice the small practical things, the shelter of the walkway, the sign over a door, the person making room for another customer. Taiping's streets have plenty of history, but they also have today's receipts to settle. That part rarely comes printed on a souvenir postcard.

Published 10 October 2026

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Sources and image

• DagangNews — Jalan Berek cultural trail and traders, September 2023
• Local report, 12 September 2022 — shade-tree planting and preservation work in Jalan Berek
• Twentytwo13, 28 November 2023 — Chung Keng Quee’s former townhouse

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