The wooden houses of Kampung Baru are the most vivid symbol of the village's century-long survival inside modern KL. Under the 1900 Malay Reservation Enactment, land in Kampung Baru cannot be sold to non-Malays — a legal protection that has preserved the kampung's character while everything around it was demolished and rebuilt in glass and steel. Walking the lanes behind Jalan Raja Muda Musa reveals traditional Malay stilt houses with zinc roofs, small vegetable gardens, and mosques with hand-painted signs.
The contrast is most striking from the edges of the neighbourhood, where a wooden fence or a row of stilted houses frames a view of the Petronas Towers fifty storeys above. Several streets in the interior of the kampung look almost identical to how they appeared in the 1970s. Photography is welcome; residents are generally friendly to respectful visitors.