The Standard
September 25, 2004

FIT FOR A KING

by Graham Lees

If Thomas Leonowens hadn’t inconveniently died on the Malaysian
island of Penang, Hollywood could never have made the film musical
classic The King and I starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr.

It was Leonowens’ untimely death in 1859 which forced his
impoverished young widow, Anna, to pack her bags and her two children
and head north to Bangkok to become governess to the King of Siam’s
82 children. The rest is Hollywood _ but not, by the way, Thai _
history, resurrected most recently in 1999’s less memorable remake
Anna and the King.

In the 19th century, Penang was a fashionable place to be for a
young, adventurous couple of the British empire like the Leonowens,
who moved to the island’s capital Georgetown from India.

The world has changed enormously since those times, but perhaps more
than most places once painted red on the British imperial map,
Georgetown has retained an exotic, cosmopolitan flavour found in the
town’s rich mix of architecture and even richer cuisine.

In many respects, it’s reminiscent of Singapore in its more
swashbuckling days, before both the streets and local vice were swept
clean.

The port town was named after Britain’s 18th-century King George III,
who helped lose the 13 colonies of America but gained this tiny
substitute when Captain Francis Light went looking for a safe port
for East India Company shipping between India and China. Light
induced the local sultan with offers of money and protection to hand
over Penang in 1786.

Such was the opportunist entrepreneurial entourage that followed in
the British wake in those days that Light was able to write in his
log a few months later: Our inhabitants increase very fast. They are
already disputing the ground, everyone building as fast as he can.”
Light had a knack of inducing people. He filled a ship’s cannon with
gold coins and fired them into the waterfront jungle to encourage
rapid land clearing.

Penang was the first British acquisition east of India and it quickly
became the new home of Hainan and Hokkien Chinese, Bengalis, Tamils,
Pathans, Armenian Jews and remnants of Portuguese and Dutch
communities abandoning Siam in the wake of a devastating war with
Burma.

That exotic melting pot is still reflected in Georgetown today, home
to some of the richest mix of street food in East Asia, and a
pot-pourri of religious and colonial architecture which has survived
the buffeting of economic slumps and war.

Light’s original street layout, named after notable Englishmen of the
day, such as Buckingham, Pitt, Hutton, Greenall and Farquhar, is
still much in evidence, although one or two late 20th-century
multi-storey blocks poke into the sky.

Trishaw driver Harun, my two-hour pedalling guide, insists that the
only significant change he has noticed in 30 years of cycling around
Georgetown is the introduction of a one-way road system. It is more
work for the legs, sir,” the 51-year-old ethnic Tamil says with a
wry smile.

A leisurely tour with the wiry Harun, or one of his dozens of
pith-helmeted colleagues, takes in many of the sights and smells of
the town _ from the esplanade’s Victorian City Hall, which looks more
like a grand hotel on the seafront of England’s Brighton resort, to
the bubbling curry pots of Little India. There is the simple
white-painted St George’s Church on Bishop Street, built in 1818;
mosques, Sikh, Hindu and Buddhist temples _ notably the Chaiya
Mangkalaram with its large reclining gold Buddha _ and the Chinese
shophouse at 120 Armenian Street where Dr Sun Yat Sen is said by
local historians to have lodged and plotted his 1911 revolution in
China. He certainly did a lot of plotting around Southeast Asia.

The Anglican cemetery on Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah street is the last
resting place of Captain Light and Thomas Leonowens, whose gravestone
describes him as an army officer struck down by sunstroke.

Penang also was a favourite stopping off place for later characters
of the British empire, notably authors Rudyard Kipling and Somerset
Maugham and the entertainer Noel Coward. They all stayed at the
waterfront Eastern and Oriental Hotel, which in its heyday was said
to be the British empire’s best hotel east of the Suez Canal. It
boasted the world’s longest seafront garden lawn which stretched 280
metres.

After a sad period of decline and closure the hotel has now re-opened
following a US $ 16 million (HK$ 124.8 million) renovation. The E&O,
as it’s known, was founded by the Sarkies brothers, the Armenian
family who also created Singapore’s Raffles Hotel and The Strand in
Rangoon before losing their shirts in the Great Depression of the
1930s.

Today, the E&O is again a match for Raffles _ among other luxuries it
boasts a personal butler service for guests _ but is now owned by the
Malaysian property company Eastern & Oriental Berhad.

The street hawker life that disappeared 25 years ago in Singapore is
still alive and well here. Few trishaw drivers manage to steer
through the street food stall congestion of Chinatown and the silk
shops of Little India without a passenger stop.

By accident rather than design, probably the greatest asset the
British left behind in Georgetown is not the English language, still
spoken widely, nor the architectural edifices of imperial power, but
the exotically diverse cuisine. It’s no exaggeration to say that at
any one time half of Georgetown seems to be cooking for the other
half. The added delight for everyone, residents and visitors, is that
only a stone’s throw separates the street woks of Chinatown from the
Malay and ethnic Indian and Thai cooking pots. Cooks here have rubbed
shoulders for more than 150 years, leading to a kind of fusion
cuisine known as nyonya or nonya. It’s primarily a mix of Chinese and
Malay ingredients and methods. Nyonya cuisine is linked to the old
Portuguese-British colony of Malacca in southern Malaysia, where it’s
influenced by Indonesian cooking, and Penang where it’s influenced by
Thai ingredients.

A classic example is Penang laksa: a thick sweet-and-sour fish soup
with rice noodles, tamarind, onion, chilli, cucumber and pineapple.

Another Georgetown culinary delight is mamak, an adaptation of
southern Indian Muslim dishes which include the pancake-like murtabak
stuffed with mutton, vegetables and plenty of spices.

And the garlic or onion naan breads cooked to order before your eyes
at Kasim Mustapfa’s on Chula Street are the freshest I’ve tasted
anywhere. Much of this exquisite dining is in the much lived-in old
quarter of Georgetown, with its narrow streets of single-storey
houses.

The Malaysian government in Kuala Lumpur likes to promote Penang as
Silicon Island” because of the concentration of international high
technology industries on the southeast coast, but Georgetown has one
of the biggest concentrations of pre-1945 buildings in the region _
the result of a quirky rent control law which had the effect of
deterring property owners from redevelopment binges. The law was
abolished recently and now the city authorities are scrambling to
secure long-term protection by acquiring United Nations World
Heritage Site status.

If the heat of the town becomes oppressive in the early afternoon,
instead of retreating into hotel air-conditioning you can still do
what generations of sahibs and memsahibs did _ head for the cool of
the nearby hills. The peak of Penang Hill, 800 metres high, is
reached by a funicular railway built in 1924. Macaque monkeys swing
from trees alongside the track.

The British began building their weekend bungalows up the hill in
1800, and Penang historians insist that this was the first hill
station” of the British empire _ the cooler mountain retreats common
later in India among the colonial elite.

Much of the interior of the 24-kilometre long island remains
undeveloped, but the northern coast has several large beach resorts,
notably Batu Ferringhi, 18 kilometres from Georgetown. But a beach is
a beach wherever the sea washes up, whereas Penang’s capital is
unique.

Source: The Standard.