George Town, Penang

George Town is the capital of Penang state and the historic urban core of one of the oldest British settlements in Southeast Asia, co-inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site with Malacca in 2008. Its inner city preserves an exceptional concentration of pre-war shophouse architecture built by Hokkien, Cantonese, Tamil, and European communities across several centuries. A celebrated tradition of street murals and iron wire sculptures created by Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic from 2012 onward transformed many lanes into open-air galleries.