Penang Days Three and Four: Sights for Sore Feet

This is entry three of Arie's trip to Penang. You may want to start at day one.

Sunday, January 7th was pouring, so we went to the mall. I thought it was fairly dull (even with an electronics store showing Snakes on a Plane), but apparently there are very cheap shoes there (Jimmy Choo is from a shoemaking family in Penang), and I understand some people like that sort of thing. Indian food for lunch, still pouring, back to the night market for dinner and some shopping.

Monday, January 8th had much better weather. I started the day with a taxi to George Town's Padang, which is a large open field that the British built in most of their Malaysian towns. It was surrounded by various government buildings including City Hall, the State Assembly Building, and the Supreme Court. The first two were beautifully designed, the third covered in scaffolding.

Since the weekend was over, we figured everything would be open. But no, most stores were closed--a guy who was setting up shop (at noon) explained that nothing in Penang opens before 12:30pm. That's right, they don't work weekends and they don't work mornings. No wonder there's been so much immigration.

We had tea at the E&O Hotel, a very old and semi-famous hotel that was recently reopened. There was a beautiful view from its garden. Somerset Maugham wrote about it extensively, and was a regular guest (as were various other famous figures). Lonely Planet told us there was a cheap and tasty lunch, but it wasn't cheap and didn't appear to be tasty, so we passed.

I then walked to St. George's Church, the oldest church on the island and the oldest Anglican church in Southeast Asia. It was built in 1818 with, of course, convict labor. It was pretty, and I would have liked to go inside, but it was locked up.

Next stop was Kuan Yin Teng, a Chinese temple--Kuan Yin is a fertility goddess (also peace, mercy, and good fortune). The temple wasn't too exciting, but there were the largest incense sticks I've ever seen burning out front.

After that was Sri Mariamann Temple, this one Hindu (built in the southern Indian style). The top of the temple was highly decorated with various deities, apparently it's supposed to be Mount Meru (which supports the heavens in Hindu cosmology). It was built in 1883.

Finishing my tour of religious buildings was Masjid Kapitan Keling Mosque, I think the oldest mosque in town, built in 1801. It featured a visitors' center where you could go to, for example, study a chart that demonstrates the lineage from Adam to Mohammed.

Comparing the religious buildings was interesting. The most ornate was the Hindu temple, while the mosque was the most dignified. The Chinese temple had the most activity outside it, while the church had the least--I guess there aren't many Anglicans left in Penang anymore.

My next stop was Khoo Kongsi. The Kongsi are houses for Chinese people who share a surname (clan houses, sort of), and the Khoo clan house and temple are some of the richest and most important in Penang. They've had a building there since 1835, and today it's a museum (that gives the history of the Khoo clan, their tribulations in arriving in Penang, and the achievements of their more notable members) as well as a functioning clan house. The original roof of the temple caught fire the night it was completed (or possibly on Chinese New Year's Eve, or maybe both), and the superstitious believe it was because their ancestors were jealous--only the dead could live in a building so magnificent, apparently. It was rebuilt toned-down. Today, the museum says that "It was superstitiously believed that the clanhouse was too stately for deities."

I swung by one more religious building, the Hainan Temple (founded in 1870, dedicated to Mar Chor, the patron saint of sailors), and then on to a tour of Cheong Fatt Tze's house.

Cheong Fatt Tze was an odd guy. He left home penniless at the age of sixteen hoping to escape having to become a farmer. He sailed to Malaysia and started working various jobs for the British colonial authorities, and between his business sense and a series of intelligent marriages to wealthy women, he became extremely wealthy and powerful. When he visited New York toward the end of his life, he was declared (by whom, I don't know) the "Rockefeller of the East", and when he died, the British government ordered that all British flags around the world be flown at half mast.

He built eight mansions for himself in different cities, and in each one he maintained a wife and family. The Penang mansion was his favorite, and he went through quite a bit to build it. He bought the land when it was swampland (now it's downtown George Town), and in his designs attempted to create a fusion of British and Chinese influences (at a time when all other construction in the city was still Anglo-Indian). He had cast iron foundries in Scotland cast most of his railings and metal furnishings, brought in stained glass experts from, well, somewhere, and used traditional Chinese wood and gold decorations to create a series of screens and walls throughout the building. Many pictures are constructed from pot shards, smashed and then pieced together into intricate designs. The outer walls are covered in a special kind of blue paint (which apparently washes off when it rains, the tour guide was a little unclear on that).

He put a lot of money into obeying the dictates of Feng Shui. Feng Shui, which is Mandarin for "wind and water", dictates various principles that should be followed when building to maximize energy (qi) flows through the structure. As the name suggests, the most important principles relate to the flows of wind and water through the house. Many cultures have developed ideas about harmonious placement of items, but the Chinese probably carried it to its furthest development. According to feng shui, qi is dispersed by wind, but is halted by water, and the goal is to collect qi in the home and funnel it towards the occupants. Location is the most important factor--ideally, the hill should be "on the back of a dragon" (on a hill) and facing water so that wind (and thus qi) runs through the house and then stops. Cheong Fatt Tze's mansion is built along these lines--back to a mansion, front facing the ocean, shutters designed to let wind through, and a complex system of pipes which channels rainwater throughout the house so as to maximize qi flow.

His Penang mansion, being his favorite, housed his favorite wife and son. To ensure their well-being, he put in his will that they would be given the then-highly generous sum of $250/month and that the house could not be sold while his son was alive. Of course, after a few decades of inflation, $250/month wouldn't even pay the upkeep on the house, and so it was reduced to a fairly decrepit state (and filled with squatters).

His son died in 1989, and that's when local businessmen jumped in. They bought the house, paid off the squatters to leave, and began a massive restoration project. Cheong's relatives had stripped the house of most of its valuable goods, so they attempted to have many of the furnishings replicated in the manner in which they were originally built. For their efforts, they were rewarded with a UNESCO Heritage Conservation Award.

The tour itself is a bit long--the first half hour or so is listening to the guide tell Cheong's life story--but it's the only way to get a look inside the mansion other than to rent a room (it also operates as a very upscale guest house).

After the tour, I ordered some tandoori street food and watched them cook it. A tandoor is a clay and brick oven developed in northern India and Pakistan that gets very, very hot (900 degrees Fahrenheit)--it can cook a chicken in five minutes. Meats are skewered and put directly into the fire. I had always wondered how they get the bread to develop those large bubbles--turns out they stick it to the side of the oven. It was delicious.

After sunset, I walked around the town some more. The temples in Chinatown and Little India were lit up nicely, and Kuan Yin Teng's giant incense was still sparking a little. I went to take a few more photos of St. George's Church and a rather suspicious guy introduced himself and explained that he had been trying to make friends with westerners for weeks, but none would talk to him--one girl even ran away when he approached. I suggested he go to a bar, and he suggested he walk with me for a while so we could talk. He said he didn't want anything from me, no money, no food, just wanted to talk to someone. I explained that I was there to take photos and it wasn't really a group activity, but maybe he could try going to a bar in the backpacker district. Then he asked me for money. Cynicism triumphs again.

I walked back through the colonial district and up to the Victoria Memorial Clocktower--donated by a local Chinese millionaire to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, it's sixty feet high--one foot for every year of her reign up until that point (she went on to hit sixty-four--the longest-reigning British monarch).

Dinner was at a food court near Cheong Fatt Tze's house, satay (sweet and spicy, not like satay normally is) and Baba-Nyonya chicken with coconut milk and rice. The Baba-Nyonya, a.k.a. Peranakan and Straits Chinese, are the first immigrants to Malaysia from China. They were closely allied with the British, and considered themselves an ethnic and social group from more recent Chinese immigrants. Today they have almost disappeared, reabsorbed into the mainstream Chinese culture, but the food lives on.

That's about it for my Penang trip. It's definitely one of the most interesting places I've visited so far--while all of Southeast Asia reflects a mix of Indian and Chinese cultures, Penang is unique because it's a more recent blending of cultures, and a purer one--if there were indigenous people in Penang before the British arrived, they have left no traces. Cambodia and Laos demonstrate the local societies' reactions Chinese and Indian influence over millennia, while Penang was formed from Sino-Indian contact in just over two centuries. It's a beautiful, interesting, and tasty place to visit.