FT275


We were on our way to Penang – the most Chinese of Malaysia’s states – when word reached us that Ion Will, a founding member of the Gang of Fort, had died (see Necrolog, FT274:24–25). My wife Sam and I try to spend a few days on the island whenever we are in Malaysia, but this was an uncanny coincidence, as we first came here on our honeymoon 34 years earl­ier, at Ion’s insistence. He also recomm­ended we stay in a small Chinese-run back-packers’ hotel on Chulia Street. It had seen better days, but we didn’t mind; being woken in the early hours by the call to prayer from the nearby Kapitan Keling mosque, or sharing a mouldy shower-room with the rat that peered out of the drain seemed so… exotic!

What really rattled us, though, was Ion hammering on our room door just several days after we’d left him in London. While we wanted time to ourselves, it seemed churlish to send him away; instead, he took us on a memorable tour of the Chinese clan houses that cluster in the centre of Georgetown. On this latest occasion, Sam and I thought we’d revisit some of those places. As we wandered, we kept an eye open for what Ion had declared was his “favourite opium den”, gesturing towards a seedy alleyway. It was quite credible that he had a number to choose from; however, in the interim, Georgetown has become a World Heritage site and much has been ‘cleaned up’. There were still seedy alleys in abundance, but nothing that evoked any memories.

Chinese and Hindu temples are everywhere here, even on street corn­ers,[1] but two have a strong curiosity element. The otherwise dull ‘Snake Temple’ in the airport/Bayan Lapas area is filled with pit vipers. They dangle languidly from frameworks of old tree branches provided inside for them, and lurk in nooks or coil on the altars. It sounds daunting but, so we are told, no one has ever been bitten there. Some guides say that the huge clouds of incense smoke keep them subdued; the faithful, however, put it down to the posthumous influence of Chor Soo Kong, a renowned Buddhist healer to whom the shrine is dedicated. One Chinese acquaintance told us that there is a huge python somewhere in the smoky gloom… and that it is only ever seen on the feast day of Chor Soo Kong. He said that he himself had watched on such a day as the python slid out of the main entrance to cross a road and bask in the morning sun, until later retiring back into the temple depths.

The grandest temple is the Kek Lok Si on Crane Hill at Air Itam, said to be the most extensive temple in Southeast Asia. It was founded in 1890 with a gift from the Qing emperor Guangxu of 70,000 volumes of Buddhist sutras copied from the Imperial Library. It is a huge complex and includes prayer halls, pavilions, and a large monastery. The towering octa­gonal ‘Pagoda of 10,000 Buddhas’ in the Chinese style is topped by a Thai-style crown – its foundation stone set in 1930 by King Rama VI – symbol­ising the pract­ice there of two schools of Budd­hism. On the hilltop overlooking the whole island is a giant bronze statue, 30.2m (100ft) high, of the bodhisattva Kuan Yin (completed in 2002), sheltering under an octagonal canopy supported by 16 dragon-pillars (completed in 2009).

At the heart of old Georgetown are the kongsis (clan houses) that Ion loved, built to house the benevolent societies formed by overseas Chinese clans. Workers have been brought here from India and China by various powers since the 15th century; and the Chinese at least continued to come from the provinces of Fujian, Guangdong Guangxi and Hainan up to the 20th century. There are local legends of an old network of secret tunnels below the town that linked some of the kongsis to the sea to further their smuggl­ing activities.

Some of the richest of the old clans in Georgetown maintained their own compounds, the grandest of these being the Khoo Kongsi.[2] It is a tiny village hidden away among the city streets, its narrow, defensible alleyways leading to a sizeable enclosure containing houses, shops and admin rooms. Across its courtyard, an opera stage faces the majestic clan temple, the Leong San Tong. The old cellars below the temple are being converted into a museum tracing the Khoo clan history back more than six centuries to a handful of villages in China. (The surname Khoo was not the common factor; any who could trace their ancestry to those villages could ‘belong’ here.)

The clans and their secret societies frequently warred against each other over profitable enterprises, including mining and farming opium for the British. Cannon Street, the main alley leading into the Khoo Kongsi, gained its name during the Penang riots of 1867. When a vicious nine-day street battle broke out between two kongsis – the Hokkien Hai San and the Red Flag Society on one side, the Cantonese Ghee Hin and the White Flag Society on the other, each with their own affiliated Malay cohorts – British residents were given shelter in the Khoo enclave and defended with cannons until relief troops came from Singapore. The holes in the masonry made by bullets and cannonballs can still be seen there today.

We were also in Penang in 2009 when John Michell died. At that time, the monastery at Kek Lok Si was raising money for a new roof for their library. For a donation, a monk would write a requested name on a newly glazed tile to be installed later. The names of John Michell and Steve Moore’s brother Chris are up there now; we’ll do something for Ion on another visit.

On our last full day in Penang, Sam and I decided to check out the island’s association with the Ming Dynasty Admiral and Grand Eunuch Cheng Ho (Mandarin: Zheng He). Cheng Ho’s fleet of several hundred ships dominated the ‘Western Ocean’ as far as Aden for much of the 15th century. In this time, he made five visits to Penang and established a huge warehouse complex, called Guan Chang, on the mainland at the Melaka River estuary.[3]

Cheng Ho came from a line of practising Muslims. At the age of 11, he was castrated and sent to the Imper­ial court, where he became a trusted advisor to the Yungle emperor and was given the court name ‘San Bao’ (Mandarin), which becomes ‘Sam Poh’ in Cantonese (the dominant dialect throughout Malaysia). However, ‘San Bao/Sam Poh’ also refers to the ‘three treasures or refuges’ of Buddhism – the Buddha, the teaching and the commun­ity – to which a great many temples are dedicated. This strange pun has led to some confused claims that temples are dedicated to Cheng Ho. Most Sam Poh Tongs (‘Hall of Three Treasures’) on the mainland have no association with Cheng Ho at all. The largest, built into limestone caverns near Ipoh, is well worth a visit. However, there is some historical evidence that after the Portuguese colonised Malacca in 1511, many of the Chinese Muslim mosques (probably founded by Cheng Ho’s crew or passengers) “became San Bao Chin­ese temples commemorating Zheng He”, which probably started all the confusion.[4]

The tourist literature mentions a Sam Poh Tong at Batu Maung, a small fishing village to the south of the international airport on the south-eastern tip of the island. This one boasts an unusual Cheng Ho connection: it is built around “a giant footprint” said to have been stamped into the rock by Cheng Ho himself. It proved very difficult to find. After a 90-minute bus ride (from the Komtar terminus) we were unsure about where to get off. No one on the bus seemed certain about the whereabouts of the ‘footprint temple’; so we decided to disembark, have lunch and ask the locals. The smell of freshly frying char kueh teow from a roadside restaurant was too good to resist and, when we’d done, we asked the cook… who asked his helper, who asked someone else. Soon a small crowd had gathered as more diners joined in a noisy, but good-natured disputation. To our delight, one of the diners declared that, if we didn’t mind waiting while she finished lunch, she’d take us there… which she did. Malays­ians are friendly like that!

Up a rough lane we went, past a spooky temple on a hill and a sinister-looking pack of dogs. A huge rock loomed on the edge of a company car park, narrow steps winding around it to a makeshift altar at the top. It looked promising. Going around by the car park, we saw an enormous modern painting on the east face of the rock, instantly recognisable as depicting Cheng Ho and his mighty fleet. A typical Chinese gateway led into an ornamental courtyard and a well-kept temple no bigger than a single garage.

Before the elevated altar, was what looked like a well; it was quite shallow and at the bottom was the famous footprint. It clearly wasn’t an actual footprint, but a slight depression in the rough shape of a large humanoid left foot, about 13in (33cm) long. The shape was enhanced by damp, but whether the water was applied by worshipp­ers or seepage from underground, I couldn’t tell. The Western practice of tossing coins into the well for luck was evident too. The veranda gave a good view of moored fishing boats, but the site was deserted with no indication of who looked after the place. We later learned that the simulacrum also attracts Hindus to this Chinese temple in the belief that it was made by Hanuman, the monkey hero of the Ramayana, in a great leap across the ocean.

On the Internet, I stumbled upon the researches of Himanshu Bhatt, a staff writer for the ‘Exotic Penang Heritage’ website, who grew up locally. In 1993, when he asked around, two elderly Malays told him that the Batu Maung footprint had been there for hundreds of years and was said, in a Malay myth, to have been made by a giant called Gedembai. There were three other footprints, they said, and Bhatt set out to find them. One was “a complementary right foot print of the same size in jungle in Bayan Lepas”, known as Tapak Gedembai (Gedembai’s footprint), writes Bhatt. The other two “prints are said to exist on the nearby islets of Pulau Aman and Pulau Jerejak.” His photos of the simulacra show them in 1993 at the time of their rediscovery. Nothing much is known about them since then.

Gedembai seems to be some sort of protean pre-Islamic nature spirit – more Medusa than ‘manimal’ – and can be described quite differently in legends from other Malay states. A fairly common characteristic, though, is its ability to petrify; as a result, stone simulacra throughout Malaya are typically attributed to the Gedembai (aka Galembai or Kelembai). On the island of Langkawi for example, there are legends in which Gedembai (or Sang Gadembai) is a beautiful female, a ghost, or a vampire. She is also a humanoid giantess who was ousted from her limestone cave by the arrival of Garuda (the giant eagle-companion of Vishnu), suggesting her origins might even pre-date the advent here of Hinduism.

In Penang state, Gedembai was described as a huge Wildman. Interestingly, Walter Skeat’s Fables and Folk Tales from an Eastern Forest (1901) notes that the forest-dwelling Malays of Kuantan, a state on the east coast, feared “a race of gigantic spirits named Gedembai” who could turn people into wood or stone. Unbelievably stupid, these forest beings were outwitted by wily natives so often that they fled this world. Even now, old trees overhanging rivers are said to have once been people who refused to follow the Gedembai in their flight. In the Kinta Valley, in Perak state, however, they have a legend of forest-dwelling, “small pixie-like creatures” called Sang Gedembai, who have lived there “since the world was young”. Curiously, this lore does not seem to have attracted much scholarly attention.





Notes
1 Discovering Penang.
2 Cheng Ho Cultural Museum.
3 Zheng He, Wikipedia.
4 Malaysia Own Bigfoot?.