Last year the influential journal Foreign Policy, the consultancy A.T. Kearney, and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs teamed up to measure the most globalised cities around the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly New York emerged as the No. 1 global city, followed by London, Paris, and Tokyo. A few other Asian cities were in the top 10 including Hong Kong and Singapore while Beijing and Shanghai made the top 20.

All very interesting. But had Foreign Policy been around in the 1400s the clear winner would have been Malacca, the most globalised city on earth then by far. Half a day’s strolling around Malacca provides evidence aplenty of this. Malacca sat at the heart of the new trade routes to the Spice Islands, China and the East. You couldn’t miss it sailing either way. A half day’s tour will take you past the A’ Famosa Portuguese fortress from 1511, the Dutch-built Christ Church from 1753, the French built Gothic St. Francis Xavier’s Church from 1849 or the cemetery which is full of the former employees of the British East India Company.

Add to this the visitors from China, India, Sri Lanka, Spain and a half dozen more countries over the centuries and Malacca stands as a unique city reflecting a bewildering range of architectural styles and cuisines. Plenty of globalised cities today earn their ranking thanks to a profusion of ethnic restaurants to tempt the palate but even the recent fashions for fusion food can’t compete with the sheer mix of Malacca’s Nyonya-Baba cuisine, a mixture of Chinese (mostly southern Hokkien or Fujian influence), Portuguese, Dutch, Indian, British and Malay cooking which firmly dispels the myth that “too many cooks spoil the broth”.

So how did Malacca become a global city?

Well, we should probably thank a man by the name of Parameswara, a Srivijayan prince of Palembang who fled Sumatra following an attack in 1377. Parameswara found his way to Malacca around 1400 where he discovered a good port accessible all year round and strategically located at the narrowest point of the Malacca Straits. This was to be the kingdom of Raja Iskandar Shah (Parameswara converted to Islam in 1414 and changed his name). He had chosen his spot well. Almost immediately Malacca became a major international port and “nodal point” favoured by mariners as Parameswara tamed the local pirates and established fair and reliable facilities for warehousing and trade.

His timing was good too and he successfully attracted Malacca’s first major community after the Malays – the Chinese. In the 1400s the transhipments between the water routes of South East Asia, the South China Sea and the ports of the Indian Ocean were becoming commercially viable. As anyone who has read Gavin Menzies’s best seller 1421 knows the great Chinese admiral Zheng He and his massive “Treasure Ship” fleets were among the first to call at Malacca. The great Chinese chronicler Ma Huan tells us that the Chinese instantly realised the importance of Malacca and sealed a truce with the King presenting him with “two silver seals, a hat, a girdle, and a robe”. The head of the Chinese expedition erected a stone tablet in Malacca; the King was to subsequently visit the Ming Dynasty as a head of state. The trust endured – Chinese treasure ships off-loaded cargo and traded goods at the port in a secure compound that was made available to them where the goods and tribute could await their return from the Indian Ocean.

Of course Malacca’s success attracted envy. The Siamese attempted invasions in 1446 and 1456 but were warded off by Tun Perak, the then Bendahara (a position similar to Prime Minister) of Malacca who had built a strong defensive capability with Chinese help.

The next major influence was to come from the West rather than the East. The Portuguese, the great navigators of Eastern waters, though they did not always arrive in a friendly mood. In April 1511, Afonso de Albuquerque set sail from Goa to Malacca with a force of some 1,200 men and 18 ships. They conquered the city in August taking control of Malacca intending it as a base for their expansion further east. Malacca was not surrendered without a fight though. Sultan Mahmud Shah, the last Sultan of Malacca, retreated inland and continued to make life difficult for the Portuguese. As a result Malacca got one of its finest examples of Portuguese architecture, the A’Famosa fort, the gate of which still survives.

However, arguably the Portuguese didn’t do much for Malacca’s economic prospects. Their conquest of the city alarmed many and disrupted trade through the Malacca Straits. Trade scattered over numerous ports along the Straits and the pirates came back out in ever increasing numbers, emboldened now all central authority was gone.

Then the “Red Hairs” came. In 1641 the Dutch defeated the Portuguese to capture Malacca with the help of the Sultan of Johore. Holland ruled Malacca from 1641 to 1795 but they didn’t help much either. The Dutch liked beating their enemies, the Portuguese, but had little interest in developing Malacca as a trading centre. They continued to try and boost their major Eastern colony of Batavia (Jakarta) as the region’s administrative centre. But you can’t beat geography and ultimately Malacca was better and more strategically situated than either Batavia or any of the other Dutch ports in Asia.

Still, the Dutch did leave an impressive architectural legacy that formed so much of the current lay out of the city - St. John’s Fort, reconstructed in the late 18th century with cannons facing inland to protect from overland attack; St. Peter’s Church, constructed in 1710 (and the oldest Catholic church in Malaysia); the more obviously Dutch style Christ Church and of course the Stadthuys, or Red Building, finished in 1650 as a residence for the Dutch Governor and his deputy.

The Dutch ruled Malacca for over 150 years but by the nineteenth century there was a new naval power on the block – Great Britain. The Dutch were forced to retreat under the overwhelming might of the British Navy though Malacca’s fate was to be peaceful as London and Amsterdam agreed a “swap” in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 – Malacca for Bencoolen on Sumatra, which had been a small British garrison. The British made a shrewd calculation – Bencoolen was useful but too cut off from Britain’s expanding Far Eastern empire and anyway, the pepper that had made Bencoolen initially attractive was proving more and more difficult to find and prices back in Europe were falling. Let the Dutch have it. The British rightly assumed that the future was all about controlling what these days are known as the world’s sea lanes of communication (the SLOCs) and they knew that Malacca was a key point in the Eastern SLOCs. They realised what Parameswara had realised 424 years earlier – that Malacca, if ran well and kept secure, was the pre-eminent trading port of the Malacca Straits. Control Malacca and you controlled the gateway from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea – all the shipping and all the cargo from West to East and vice versa. A strategic edge to beat just about any other.

And so from 1826 Malacca was governed, first by the largest and wealthiest corporation the world has ever known, the British East India Company, and then as a Crown Colony, forming part of the Straits Settlements, together with Singapore and Penang. The city and port prospered until the Japanese invasion and, with the dissolution of the crown colony, Malacca and Penang became part of the Malayan Union, which later became Malaysia.

Malacca’s reign as a global city was close to 500 years long. The evidence lies in the architecture, the food, the language and the general “feel” of the city. It also lies beneath the ground – Malacca is home to the largest Chinese cemetery outside Mainland China with graves dating from the early Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and the still preserved Dutch Cemetery that holds graves from both the time of the Dutch and British occupations of Malacca.

To stroll the streets and take in the sights of Malacca is to step back into the world’s most international and global city from the early fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. Malacca was globalised and a major trading port when London was still a small, relatively tight-knit community, 200 years before Shakespeare became famous, and where virtually the whole town turned out for public executions at the Tower of London. Paris was then a medieval city burning heretics at the stake and New York? Well, New York wasn’t to come into existence for nearly another 300 years. It’s an overused term but Malacca is one place that is literally ‘steeped’ in the past.