Klang, recently proclaimed a royal city, sits between the high commercialism of Kuala Lumpur, Petaling Jaya and Shah Alam, and Port Klang, the gateway feeding our consumption and distributing our goods to the world. But because of a simmering crime rate, a badly timed snide labelled Klang as "Colombia", the cocaine capital of the world.
We'll debunk this denigration momentarily. Klang had been this industrial and trading go-between since the British built Port Swettenham, the former name for Port Klang, in 1901.
As Klang transformed to piggyback on this principal trading route stretching the length of the Federal Highway, the town developed its infrastructure exponentially, if not haphazardly.
Despite humming as an industrial feeder town, Klang, and its greater extensions of Pandamaran and Port Klang, preserved its small-town charm, filled with eateries, restaurants, hawker centres and markets offering cheap seafood. It's perhaps the only small town in Malaysia that has three bridges spanning Sungai Klang and multiple flyovers commingling.
At its pop cultural peak in the 1970s and 1980s, the town animated with nightclubs showcasing live bands, and five cinemas in a few square kilometres and a stone's throw away from Emporium Makan, the original and engaging multicultural food court.
In Klang, you either live in the commercial expanse or across Sungai Klang, where the administrative hub, the government hospital, the royal palace and the cream of its middle class resides.
Despite its strategic locale, the wonder is, why didn't Klang, rather than Kuala Lumpur, flourish to become the foremost metropolis? Instead, Klang was sandbagged into a fraction of a bigger canvas of the 2,832 sq km Klang Valley.
But with rapid development came the unsavoury: air pollution from open burning; water pollution choking the Sungai Klang basin; non-stop construction and industrial growth; littering; and floods.
With growing pains, crime crept in: break-ins, muggings and car thefts, which are no worse than in other Malaysian cities. Which is why a smart alec sneered about Klang being compared with Colombia, which is far, far removed from the reality of that South American nation.
While Klang's crime rate is indelible, it nowhere mirrors Colombia's repugnance: its drug cartels produce about 60 per cent of the world's supply of cocaine and marshal 175,000 cartel members while lapsing into civil unrest, kidnappings and the occasional cartel-law enforcement brutal skirmishes.
But Colombia, straddled between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is also famed for its environmental beauty, diversity, energetic cities and consummate wildlife and outdoor adventure.
In this respect, Klang could well emulate Colombia's penchant for ecological refinement by turning the royal city into a coastal tourist, foodie and yachting haven.