Merdeka 118

This guide to Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur begins on the night of August 31, 1957, when Tunku Abdul Rahman raised his arm inside Stadium Merdeka and shouted the word for freedom seven times. You'll hear how the tower's architects made a deliberate choice to echo that raised arm in the building's spire, and how three thousand workers spent nine years raising it on the very ground where independence was declared. The stadium still stands below, unmoved amid everything built around it.