Michael Batson

Penang was Britain’s oldest colonial possession in Southeast Asia, the place where Raffles had started his overseas career with the East India Company. It was also breathtakingly beautiful. It was said that few places merited the title Pearl of the Orient as much as Penang, with its fringe of perfect beaches, its variegated interior of spice gardens and jungle covered granite hills where waterfalls cascaded into cool swimming holes.

The first Englishman reached Penang in 1591, but it was Captain Francis Light in 1786 who took possession of the island for the East India Company and King George III, albeit in a slightly less than forthright deal with the Sultan of Kedah. Light encouraged immigration and established Penang as a free port to entice traders away from nearby Dutch trading posts. Malarial-ridden however, the island killed off most who emigrated there including eventually Light himself, earning the island a new name “the white man’s grave”.

After Light’s demise the Duke of Wellington, then a lieutenant-colonel, was drafted in bolster the island’s defences. In the 1860s the island was racked by internal strife as Chinese secret societies, the Red Flag and their rivals the White Flag, battled it out on George Town’s streets, causing the British to send in the army to quell the riots.

The Chinese nationalist Sun Yet Sun found a home away from home among the island’s large Chinese population where he plotted the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty. His portrait can be still seen in the city. During World War Two the Japanese occupation brutalised the Chinese population, especially the sinister Kempeitai, the secret military police, who saw Malaya as an extension of Japan’s genocidal policies in China. They weren’t too fond of the Malays either.

Following the Japanese surrender, a strong secessionist movement was active in Penang seeking to preclude Penang's merger with Malaya. Eventually however, Penang became independent with the rest of Malaya in 1957.

Penang’s bus station is located someway from town. I could see the taxi drivers circling, albeit under a tree playing cards, and they’d looked up from their hands long enough to spot me.

As I approached one driver leapt forward leaving his cards on the table. With a last puff of his cigarette we walked towards a red and white taxi parked with all its doors open, a counter-measure against the midday heat.

“Excuse me, not my car. Where is my taxi?” We headed off laughing in another direction towards another red and white car, also with all the doors open.

“Penang about 30” he said. I asked if that was 30 minutes, kilometres or ringgits, the local currency, as I noticed we weren’t on the meter.

“Thirty ringgits” he replied. It seemed excessive but I wasn’t going to walk and there appeared to be no bus service handy. Then we were off bumper chasing all the way into town, just for the excitement of the tourist. Conversation was subsequently full of distractions due to the near misses.

We stopped for gas, as the driver had been waiting for my fare to pay for a few litres, which brought us to the topic of the cost of petrol. In Malaysia, a country with a wealth of oil, it costs about two ringgits (about 80 cents) per litre, but as the driver pointed out it was “more expensive for the green stuff”.

Penang is an island joined to the Malaysian Peninsula by twin-towered cable supported bridge. The main town is George Town, and across the watery divide its twin, the industrial town of Butterworth.

George Town is the capital of the island and state of Penang on the west coast of peninsula Malaysia and was listed by UNESCO in 2008 as a World Heritage Site. Along with Melaka, it’s one of the places to see in this part of the country. Penang has also been called the food capital of Malaysia.

The town seems quite relaxed, as restaurants, small shops, and mall shops don't fully open until around noon. I went searching for a tailors, and had three attempts before finding an open shop mid-morning, and then was ushered across the road where a couple of helpful Tamils replaced the zip in my shorts on the spot for four dollars.

The Indian curry houses are great, as I’d found elsewhere in Malaysia to date. The food is fantastic and the prices come in around about 2-3 dollars for a tasty plateful.

George Town has an impressive array of historic buildings representing the cultural heritage of Penang’s various ethnicities: Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Malays, Achenese, Siamese, Burmese and lastly, Europeans. All up there are more than 170o historic buildings within 109 hectare core historic zone, which is surrounded by the designated Buffer Zone comprising another 150 hectares.

Most of the budget hotels run off Lebuh Chulia, where all the buses run along. Nearby is the wonderfully named Love Lane (Lorang Love) with its eclectic mix of Chinese shop houses. Penang is keen on preserving the original character of the area, frowning on the seventies and eighties renovation of traditional George Town architecture, glassing in the frontage and banging an AC unit outside, desecrating the original facade.

The shop houses include a number of styles spanning two centuries, from the Early Penang Style from the 1790s-1850s through to the Early Modern finishing in the 1970s. Shop houses are characterized by amongst other features, the five-foot way, that stretch of space between the front door and the roadway or, in Penang’s case, the drain which serves as the gutter.

Historic George Town encompasses a rich collection of historic buildings over some 110 hectares. They include the Indo-Malay Palladian Style, Anglo-Indian bungalow, early shop houses, Sino-Anglo bungalows, Neo-Classical styles, Art Deco styles, Early Modern styles and the Late-Modern styles, various others, as well as numerous religious buildings such as mosques, churches, Chinese and Indian temples.

I sat down for a beer. “Where are you from?” the Chinese owner asked. I told him and he said where I came from produced the best race horses in the world.

“They come here and earn a lot of money” he said. I wondered aloud how much money.

“For 1200 metres may be two million ringgits.” Two million ringgits IS a lot of money by my reckoning. I asked who earned to money. He informed me mainly the trainers and sometimes the jockeys.

“Your country is clean” he said. “You have no pollution and all that space. Look at Europe, even the cucumbers are poisonous.” He had a point about the vegetables, nasty stuff.

My guesthouse was back to the basics, the sort of place I now rarely stay, but it was clean, if Spartan, and the fittings such as there were, were brand new. It was owned by an older Chinese couple. The man offered I change rooms to one upstairs with a window, as I was hot. He had a remarkable face almost concave in profile, given his prominent forehead and chin, and the absence of teeth. He walked with a pronounced limp and with the aid of a walking stick.

The next day I went for a shave at a barber’s shop. The razor was strong and sharp enough to amputate digits, so did the job well. Barbers double as hygienists, so I got a sort of facial in the bargain, for two dollars.

Outside the barber’s, I passed a plaque on a building which said that many of the streets in this part of town were originally called “Jeddah” on account of the pilgrims who would wait for passage to Mecca, making the pilgrimage.

At 5.50am in Penang it’s dark and you’re awoken by the call to Muslim prayer, some of it carries on over the loudspeaker for some time, including the Masjid Melayu Lebuh Acheh founded in 1808 by a wealthy Muslim, and the centre of Haj travelers. Later, at 7.30 the kids start making their way off to school in the uniform of school children everywhere in Southeast Asia, pristine white shirts with dark pants for the boys and skirts for the girls.

As Penang places much emphasis on preserving its heritage, I was keen to see what attention they paid to the environment, so a trip to the waterfront was planned. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, the waterways tell much about a city’s treatment of the environment.

Penang’s omnipresent drains seem designed for rainwater, but the sights and smells quickly reveal all manner of substances flowing through them, some of which seems to flow straight out into the tidal wash.

The tidal wash at the beachfront down by City Hall and the Town Hall, both fine colonial buildings, reveals open drains running into the surf and al manner of that modern blight on the eco-system plastic, flopping about in the shallows, a pity then.

Penang is rich in cluture and history and wonderful food, and is definitely worth a few days.