Where to Stay in Petaling Jaya, Selangor

What is Petaling Jaya known for?

Petaling Jaya was laid out as a satellite township to take pressure off Kuala Lumpur, and it has since become one of the heavier components of Greater Kuala Lumpur, carrying its own council and its own centre rather than a borrowed one. City status arrived in 2006. The Petaling Jaya Museum records the making of the town proper, while Sunway Lagoon and the Axiata Arena pull crowds in from across the whole conurbation.

What are the main landmarks in Petaling Jaya?

The list is unusually long. Within the city itself the Petaling Jaya Museum, St. Francis Xavier's Church, Petaling Jaya and the Evangelical Lutheran Zion Church are the named fixtures, and Sunway Lagoon anchors the leisure side of the same municipality. The capital's own collection sits alongside.

Because Petaling Jaya adjoins Kuala Lumpur, the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, the National Museum of Malaysia, the National Monument, Pusat Sains Negara and the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park all fall inside the same short radius. Sporting venues close out the list. Axiata Arena is the largest indoor venue on this side of Greater Kuala Lumpur.

What is the history of Petaling Jaya?

The township was planned, not inherited. Petaling Jaya was created in 1954 as a satellite settlement for Kuala Lumpur, drawn up to house people the capital could no longer absorb, which makes its street pattern deliberate in a way that older Malaysian towns are not. Growth outran the brief quickly.

What began as an overflow scheme filled its allotted ground, spread across roughly 97.2 square kilometres of Petaling District, and stopped behaving like a suburb of anywhere. City status followed on 20 June 2006. That recognition confirmed what the map already showed, and it gave Petaling Jaya a standing equal in kind, if not in age, to the capital it had been built to serve.

The shorthand stuck throughout. PJ is what Greater Kuala Lumpur has always called it, and the nickname now carries more everyday weight in speech than the full name does. Institutions arrived with the population.

St. Francis Xavier's Church, Petaling Jaya and the Evangelical Lutheran Zion Church served the incoming congregations, while the Petaling Jaya Museum was set up much later to record how the whole exercise had worked out. Leisure came last of all. Sunway Lagoon and the Axiata Arena belong to a phase in which the city stopped being a dormitory for Kuala Lumpur and began drawing visitors of its own, and the older national collections across the boundary, among them the National Museum of Malaysia and the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, remained close enough to feel like part of the same destination.

Where is Petaling Jaya?

No boundary is visible on the ground. Petaling Jaya occupies the western edge of Kuala Lumpur inside Petaling District, and its built-up area continues straight into the capital's without a river, ridge or belt of open land to separate them. Selangor surrounds it on three sides.

The city covers roughly 97.2 square kilometres of that state, with Shah Alam further west and the rest of Greater Kuala Lumpur pressing in from the east.

What is the climate of Petaling Jaya?

Whatever falls on Kuala Lumpur falls here. Petaling Jaya shares the capital's tropical air exactly, since the two cities touch, and neither the temperature nor the humidity gives much sign of a changing season across the year. Afternoons carry the drama.

Storms gather over Greater Kuala Lumpur and break in short heavy bursts that can put water across low streets, then clear in time for the evening.

How do you get to Petaling Jaya?

Arrival is a matter of crossing a line. Petaling Jaya is embedded in the road and rail network of Greater Kuala Lumpur, so almost everyone reaches it from the capital rather than from anywhere in Petaling District, and the transition registers only on signage. Shah Alam lies further out.

Traffic bound for the state capital and for Klang passes through or around Petaling Jaya, which puts the Axiata Arena and Sunway Lagoon on routes that most visitors are already using.