Reviews & Press : : Streets of George Town, Penang: An Illustrated Guide to Penang's City Streets & Historic Attractions

New Straits Times
23 April 1994
by Tan Gim Ean

Streets of diverse settlers

STREETS OF GEORGE TOWN PENANG
An Illustrated Guide to Penang's City Streets & Historic Attractions Text & photos by Khoo Su Nin (Khoo Su Nin, 139 pages)

MENTION the streets of George Town and food springs to mind. Ais kacang at Swatow Lane, Air Itam laksa, mee rebus at Bangkok Lane, Gurney Drive bak kut teh, char kway teow at Lorong Selamat, etc

Next time, instead of dig­ging into the bowl before you, look up and check out your surroundings.. There's more than meets the eye on the Streets of George Town Penang, if you follow Khoo Su Nin's illustrated book.

Khoo calls it a "serious guide to things visible and invisible" in the historic, cosmopolitan city named af­ter King George III.

The obvious would be the monuments, memorials, as­sociations, places of war­ship, historic residences, commercial buildings, shops and coffeeshops, wet markets, traditional crafts and occupations, and cul­tural and festival venues.

The "invisible" list is even longer and stretches way back to before the 15th cen­tury, when Penang was a part of Kedah. After Francis Light landed in 1786, he named it Prince of Wales Island and it became a part of India.

Spices, tin and rubber shaped Penang's fluctuat­ing early growth. George Town, sited on a swampy, malaria-infested part of the island, was considered a du­bious investment by the East India Company in Ben­gal.

But as a free and neutral port, it attracted settlers who were to lay the founda­tion for future generations. It became a haven for the Malays escaping Siamese at­tack in Kedah, the Eur­asians fleeing religious per­secution in South Thailand, the Chinese facing oppres­sion under the Manchus, and poverty-stricken South Indians.

Straits Chinese and Indi­an Muslim traders from Ma­lacca and the coastal areas were attracted to the oppor­tunities at the new British trading post. Among the other arrivals were Bur­mese and Indians toeing the line of their colonial em­ployers, Armenians, Per­sians and Jews making trade connections east of In­dia, and Arabs and Acheh­nese eager to consolidate the spice trade and propa­gate Islam in the region.

This mixed bag of settlers brought their own lan­guages, cultures and tastes to the unique melting pot. As they settled in, they be­gan to build homes and structures which reflected chunks of their respective history and architecture.

In the Preface, Khoo notes that "written records over the last two centuries re­flect observations of travel­lers and concerns of public administration, or docu­ment the contributions of the wealthy".

Therefore, she feels that the historical buildings and streets of George Town pre­sent a more "democratic" way to relate Penang's past lives; they stand as "physi­cal evidence of the diverse peoples who have taken part in the city's growth".

Even so, the bulk of her 280 photographs and text lean towards 18th- and 19th­century history. The author says that the slant is inten­tional, as she wants to "es­tablish a strong picture of George Town's foundation".

But Khoo hasn't written a typical history book with a boggling compilation of names, dates and events. In­stead, the Penang-born-and­ bred author takes readers on an alphabetical tour through streets which bus­tle with colourful personal­ities, under intricate arches into smokey kongsis with ornamental roofs, through traditional neighbourhoods and urban villages, along five-foot ways where local cultures thrive, and past stately mansions which ooze pre-war opulence.

As you pause to catch your breath, she goes into the background of the com­munities behind the struc­tures, how urban develop­ment shaped various units, the peculiarities of different forms of architecture, and how George Town's street culture is closely linked to its relics, sidewalks, corri­dors, pillars, compounds and interiors.

There's a story to every street and Khoo tells us how some got their names (e.g. the Chinese call Carnarvon Street Lam Chan Ah, after the swampy rice fields of its early days), how the premier girls' school Convent Light Street was used to house American prisoners during World War II (after the war, one of them related his experiences there in a book called Threshold of Hell), why the Indians called Weld Quay Kitengi Teru (Street of Company Go­downs), and where to find the earliest Indian Muslim shrine on the island, or the mausoleum of Sheikh Omar Basheer.

The pictures in the book are sharp (though you wish some could have been big­ger) and provide a colourful, visual back-up to the infor­mative commentary.

Streets of George Town is an eye-opening guide, par­ticularly for children of Pe­nang who know little, or nothing, about its lively his­tory. It is an extensive work by Khoo, secretary of the Penang Heritage Trust, who believes "conservation ef­forts are urgently needed to allow its rich past to con­tribute to its future".