The Dragon From Beneath Robson Hill

Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia — early 2007

In March 2007 I moved from a house in rural Yuwa-machi, Akita-ken, Japan, to a condo on a hill in central Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Robson Hill rises quietly above the Klang River Valley, its slopes once thick with jungle. Before the condominiums and the arterial roads, this ridge was home to Chinese settlers who carved out lives in the wilds—clearing land, building shrines, burying their dead. By the late 19th century, this very hill had become a spiritual anchor: temples bloomed, cemeteries expanded, and dragons—those fierce, protective emblems—began to appear in stone and plaster, watching over the living and the departed.

Urbanisation creeps in. Roads are widened. The Klang-Kuala Lumpur Highway was started in the late 1950s and by the 80s -- when I first lived in the area -- it was a full-fledged highway just below Robson. Many of the hills of central KL were cut up in the name of progress. By the 1990s, Robson Heights Condominium was built on the crest of Robson Hill, a modern sentinel overlooking the Thean Hou Temple with the vast Kwong Tong (Chinese) cemetery behind it. Rumors circulate: an old temple building may have been razed during construction. No records that I know of confirm it, but the land bears scars—terraces carved and slopes reinforced.

While I’m living in Robson Heights, and on a quiet afternoon, I wander down the mostly clear cut hillock below the condo. The air is still, the ground hard from a lack of recent rain. Bamboo and saplings lean in from a more densely forested edge of the large clearing just beneath the condo’s outer wall. I’m not searching for anything—just walking, looking for a path that will take me even further down to a city road that leads directly into the cemetery.

Then I see it. A shard in the soil, half-buried. I kneel. Brush away the earth. A dragon’s face stares at me—flared nostrils, fierce eyes, stylized mane curling like smoke. The fragment is cast from concrete or grout, not carved stone. Its texture is rough, its edges broken. It’s clearly part of something larger, now lost.

I lift it gently. The weight is modest, but its presence is immense. Mounted later on the stand shown in the photos, it reveals more: scales etched with care, a mouth mid-roar, the suggestion of eagle-like talons. This is no garden ornament. It’s a guardian—perhaps once affixed to a temple wall, a funerary gate, or a ceremonial arch. Its style echoes the dragons of nearby Thean Hou and other Chinese folk architecture: protectors, boundary markers, symbols of power and continuity.

I speculate. Could the fragment have belonged to the vanished temple mentioned during the condo’s construction? Was it discarded in rubble, buried in fill, forgotten as the hill was reshaped? Or did it fall from a grave marker, a silent sentinel dislodged by time?

Whatever its origin, the dragon shard speaks to the Chinese presence on Robson Hill and throughout the Klang Valley—their labor, their rituals, their resilience. The dragon, in this context, is more than myth. It’s a declaration: We are here. We guard this place. We shape the land and honor our dead.

This piece, found by chance, becomes a portal for me. It links KL's urban present to a spiritual past. It’s testament to the fact that history isn’t just preserved in museums—it can be scattered in the soil, waiting for someone to notice.