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  • Fit for a king

    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.
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