Early Penang Hill Station

American Geographical Society

Early Penang Hill StationAuthor(s): S. Robert AikenSource: Geographical Review, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Oct., 1987), pp. 421-439Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/214282 .

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EARLY PENANG HILL STATION*

S. ROBERT AIKEN

ABSTRACT. Penang Hill is one of the hill stations that originated in the upland tropics during the colonial era. Functional composition and landscape characteristics of Penang Hill during the early nineteenth century are described in the context of contemporary medical concepts, perceived health hazards, leisure pursuits, and cultural transfers. Penang Hill increasingly resembled an ideal model of "home."

TROPICAL hill stations were functionally specialized outposts of colonial settlement that initially served as health-and-recreation centers for civil servants, military personnel, planters, miners, and other expatriate Eu-

ropeans or as strategic bases and military cantonments. Hill stations originated in Dutch and British Asiatic colonies during the early nineteenth century, and this type of settlement spread to other parts of Asia that came under colonial domination.' The form failed to develop in regions that were not brought under direct European control.

A metaphor is that of a belvedere, a lofty site with a commanding view. Simla, the summer capital of the Raj, was the British belvedere par excellence. Hill stations were made possible by the ability of Europeans to acquire territory, to command strategically important uplands, to construct roads and railroads into previously inaccessible hills and mountains, and to control and exploit the economies, natural resources, and peoples of subjugated lands. Accompanying these forces were certain attitudes toward people, places, and landscapes and certain socially and culturally prescribed behavioral patterns. The sociocultural background and experiences of the Europeans provided the rationale for a possible, though not inevitable, outcome of colonialism.

Colonial hill stations conjured up prospects of health and vitality, prom- ises of fun and relaxation. In both image and reality they served as the tropical equivalents of the European spas and seaside resorts. Detached from the alien life in the lowlands, the hill stations offered isolated, exclusive milieus where sojourners could feel at home. The feeling was reinforced by familiar-appearing landscapes, gardens, and architecture that evoked images and memories of well-loved distant homelands. No wonder that visitors to hill stations commented so frequently on their bracing air, their temperate flowers and fruits, and their neat little gardens as well as simple reminders

* I am grateful to the Association of American Geographers and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding. I thank John Bastin, Ray Desmond, John Dransfield, and Anthony D. King for their good counsel. Lawrence P. Kredl drew the map. I J. E. Spencer and W. L. Thomas, The Hill Stations and Summer Resorts of the Orient, Geographical Review 38 (1948): 637-651; Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 156-179; Robert R. Reed, Remarks on the Colonial Genesis of the Hill Stations in Southeast Asia with Particular Reference to the Cities of Buitenzorg (Bogor) and Baguio, Asian Profile 4 (1976): 545-591. * DR. AIKEN is an associate professor of geography at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada H3G 1M8.



422 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

of other climates like a fire in the hearth or a blanket on the bed. Nostalgia was the common experience.

Penang Hill, located on Penang Island, is the oldest of the four hill stations of colonial origin in Peninsular Malaysia (Fig. 1). The purpose of this article is to describe the origins, functional composition, and landscape characteristics of early Penang Hill, and I also attempt to evoke an image of the place. The principal functions of hill stations were refuge and resort: early Penang Hill served both as a refuge from the disease hazards and enervating climatic conditions of the lowlands and as a social place. In this study bungalows and gardens receive particular attention as evidence of cultural transfers. The period covered is the formative years prior to 1830, when the basic outlines of Penang took shape and the mold or template into which later developments were fixed was established. A long period of stagnation began after 1830 and lasted until the early 1920s, when a funicular railroad made Penang Hill more accessible than it had previously been.2

EARLY PENANG

Francis Light took possession of the island of Penang, called Pulau Pinang in Malay, on behalf of the East India Company in 1786.3 He called it Prince of Wales Island, but the name never took hold except in early governmental dispatches. Like Singapore and Malacca, Prince of Wales Island was acquired to protect the company's lucrative China trade through the Strait of Malacca and to serve as an entrep6t for the Malay peninsula and the neighboring eastern archipelago. Penang was made the fourth presidency of India in 1805, although the company considered it inferior to Bengal, Bombay, and Madras. In 1826 Penang was combined with Malacca and Singapore into a short- lived administrative unit, the presidency of the Straits Settlements. That presidency was abolished in 1830, but Penang continued as the headquarters of government for another two years, when the capital was moved to Sin- gapore. When the company lost its monopoly of the China trade in 1833, its interest in the Straits Settlements also faded, and they became a crown colony in 1867.

Penang was densely forested and virtually uninhabited when the company acquired the island in 1786. The company cleared tracts of jungle, dug wells, erected huts and houses, built roads, established pepper plantations, and laid out George Town, the principal settlement, in the "regular pattern used by Georgian architects, with a gridiron in the centre and curving roads and crescents along the shoreline."4 Accompanying those developments was

2 Illustrated Guide to Penang (Penang: Criterion Press, 1924), 7; Penang Illustrated Guide (compiled by Margaret Adams; Penang: Municipal Council of George Town, 1952), 27. 3A. M. Skinner, Memoir of Captain Francis Light, who founded Penang, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 28 (1895): 1-17; H. P. Clodd, Malaya's First British Pioneer: The Life of Francis Light (London: Luzac, 1948). 4George Woodcock, Penang: Britain's First Settlement in Malaya, History Today 19 (1969): 835.



PENANG HILL STATION 423

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the rapild installation of an immigrant society consilsting of Chinese, Indians, Malays, Arabs, Jews, Parsees, and a small complement of Europeans. Some of the non-European immigrants provided the hill-station clientele with food and services.

Though the importance of Penang was questioned, the company had raised its expectations for the island by the end of the eighteenth century. The new expectations were based on the contents of various governmental dispatches and three panegyrics that exaggerated the natural, economic, and




strategic advantages of the island, including its potential as a naval base.5 Penang was raised in status from a residency to a presidency in 1805, and a new, enlarged staff of covenanted civil and military officials with a support staff of uncovenanted junior civil servants was brought in.6 There was some increase in demand for health-and-resort facilities, although the total number of Europeans probably did not average more than 300 in this formative period and the figure was only 316 in 1864.7 Consequently Penang Hill remained small and only modestly developed.

Penang soon proved a great disappointment to the company. After the battle of Trafalgar, there was no need for a naval base at Penang, and the island was rapidly outstripped as a trading center by Singapore after 1819. Revenues from pepper plantations never reached the company's expectations of defraying administrative costs, and the salaries of senior officials were considered a drain on the Indian treasury. When the presidency was abolished in 1830, expenditure on Penang declined greatly. The official clientele for the hill station was also reduced, while the pool of other potential users, like planters, merchants, and traders, remained very small. Penang and Penang Hill stagnated.

PENANG HILL

The island of Penang lies off the coast of Province Wellesley near the northern entrance to the Strait of Malacca. Distance to the mainland varies between three and sixteen kilometers. Nearly quadrilateral in shape, the island is composed almost entirely of granite, has an area of 294 square kilometers, and consists of a mass of dissected hills rising sharply from a narrow coastal plain. Elevation increases toward the north-central part of the island, where Western Hill and Penang Hill are located. In spite of the word "hill" in the name, the hill station occupies part of a narrow, steep- sided, undulating ridge whose highest elevation is 763 meters above sea level. Between the upper ridge and the inner edge of the coastal plain west of George Town several erosional remnants stand out as isolated, generally rounded hills. These features were stripped of their rain-forest cover early in the British period, and bungalows were erected on or near their summits

(Fig. 2). The present-day hill station, which extends from the vicinity of the now-

defunct Crag Hotel on the north to several hundred yards below Fern Hill

Norman Macalister, Historical Memoir Relative to Prince of Wales Island, in the Straits of Malacca (London: Printed for the author by J. H. Hart, 1803); Sir George Leith, A Short Account of the Settlement, Produce, and Commerce, of Prince of Wales Island, in the Straits of Malacca (London: J. Booth, 1804); Sir Home Popham, A Description of Prince of Wales Island, in the Streights of Malacca; With its Real and Probable Advantages and Sources to Recommend it as a Marine Estab- lishment (London: John Stockdale, 1805). 6 L. A. Mills, British Malaya 1824-67; with an Introductory Chapter by D. K. Bassett and a Bibli- ography by C. M. Turnbull (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1966 [originally published 1925]), 83. 7 V. W. W. S. Purcell, Early Penang (Penang: Pinang Gazette Press, 1928), 135; C. M. Turnbull, The Straits Settlements 1826-67: Indian Presidency to Crown Colony (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 11.




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FIG. 2-The hill station, part of the east coast lowlands, and George Town, circa 1830. Topography, the winding hill track, the waterfall, and other points mentioned in the text can be located on this map. Source: Reproduced from a map entitled "Penang or Prince of Wales Island," surveyed by Lieut. T. Woore; dated 1832 and now in Map Room, British Library, London.

on the south, is primarily a collection of bungalows at staggered elevations, together with other recent structures. The upper tier of bungalows is more or less linked by Summit Road and several footpaths. A funicular railroad descends from near the top of Strawberry Hill to the lowlands close to Ayer Itam. From atop this little belvedere of empire, great vistas open across George Town and the shipping channel to the verdant coastal plain in Province Wellesley and Kedah to culminate on the distant blue-green mountains of the Main Range.

Penang Hill was probably the first imperial outpost of its kind in the British colonies, because the earliest hill stations in India date from 1819 and 1821. Prior to 1845 when steamships first arrived in the Straits Settlements, travel between Penang and Great Britain was time-consuming and expensive.




The East India Company usually did not permit its employees to go home on leave, and that policy was a principal factor in the demand for places of refuge and resort in the East.

The first dwellings on Penang Hill were bungalows erected by the company for the temporary accommodation of its civil and military officials. An early-nineteenth-century observer noted the ample space for "building hospitals and bunghalows [sic], or houses for sick officers," while a contemporary stated that "there is a Bungalow [on the hill] for the Lieutenant Governor, and. . . another Bungalow for the accommodation of convalescents."8 Known as Convalescent Bungalow, it was sometimes used by visitors who wanted to spend a night on the hill, although such a sojourn required official per- mission. The lack of satisfactory accommodations during much of the nineteenth century in George Town was a reason for seeking lodgings on the hill.9 In addition to local company personnel, a small number of civil and military officials came from India to visit the hill station.

Early Penang Hill was not intended as a place to prevent ill health but rather to serve as a recuperative center or sanatorium. It supplemented the mineral bath and the sea or river voyage, two other well-tried methods of seeking health and vitality. Especially during the pre-Indian hill-station period, Penang Hill was an alternative to a long sea voyage or a visit to the mineral baths at Rangoon. Generally only senior officials or prosperous merchants and traders could afford the time and the expense of venturing so far afield. The high ground above George Town was also sought for fun and relaxation, but that role was apparently less important than the refuge function.10

Few improved roads extended beyond George Town and its immediate vicinity prior to the mid-1790s, and for another decade or more roads within the town were inadequately drained and frequently impassable.1" The interior of the island was then unexplored and largely inaccessible, although as early as 1787 a rough track had been cut through the rain forest to the signal house on the crest of the ridge overlooking George Town. Getting to the bottom of the ridge must have been a difficult task before 1792, when a road was cut from the entrance into the wood to the waterfall northwest of George Town.12 In 1795 an officer described his effort to see the falls, "which

8 Macalister, footnote 5 above, 27; Leith, footnote 5 above, 10-11. 9 Charles Walter Kinloch, De Zieke Reiziger; or, Rambles in Java and the Straits in 1852, by a Bengal Civilian (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Company, 1853),9; N. B. Dennys, A Descriptive Dictionary of British Malaya (London: London and China Telegraph Office, 1894), 284. 10 James Low, The British Settlement of Penang; with an Introduction by James Jackson (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1972 [originally published 1836]), 314; John Cameron, Our Tropical Pos- sessions in Malayan India; with an Introduction by Wang Gungwu (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1965 [originally published 1865]), 326; Isabella L. Bird, The Golden Chersonese: Travels in Malaya in 1879; with an Introduction by Wang Gungwu (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967 [originally published 1883]), 258. " William Milburn, Oriental Commerce; Containing a Geographical Description of the Principal Places in the East Indies, China, and Japan (London: Black, Parry, and Company, 1813), Vol. 2, 298. 12 Penang in the Past (Penang: Pinang Gazette Press, 1925), 129.




is about six miles from the town, with a road for carriages for about four of the way, the rest I walked. .. ."13 From the vicinity of the waterfall, a narrow path began a sinuous climb to the crest of the ridge. Further road improve- ments in the late 1790s eased the journey to the waterfall, which soon became a favorite resort (Fig. 3). Indian convicts built most early roads and kept them in passable condition; by the 1820s they were probably among the best roads in the British colonies.14 The hill station was reached in two stages: from George Town to the bottom of the ridge by palanquin or on horseback, and from there to the ridge top by Sumatran pony or in a sedan. Here is a description of an ascent of the ridge by a naval surgeon in 1805.

The path-way which is not more than eight or ten feet wide, is cut with incredible labour, through a forest of immensely tall trees ... steep and rugged as this path is, the little Sumatran horses mount it with great safety: the ladies, however, are generally carried up in a kind of sedan chair, borne on the shoulders of stout Malays. After a tiresome ascent of two or three hours, we gained the summit.'5

THE HILL STATION IN THE 1820s

In the 1820s bungalows occupied the scenically most attractive and salu- brious sites on the upper ridge. The best description of the hill station at that time is found in the medical topography of Penang by T. M. Ward.16 Like several other writers, I draw heavily from this source. The preeminent site was atop Flagstaff Hill, where Bel Retiro, the governor's bungalow, was located. That structure consisted of two large thatch-covered bungalows connected by a covered plank passage or gallery that was cool and airy when opened along the sides.17 Towering above the structure was a flagpole that served as a beacon or signal station. The surrounding grounds were partially terraced, carefully tended, and stocked with a rich variety of exotic plants, including strawberries and potatoes. Vegetable mold from the lowlands was used to improve the soil, and temperate flowers grew in the gardens. Nearby on Mount Hygeia accommodations for ailing officers and their families or for other employees of the company were available at the Convalescent Bungalow (Fig. 4). James Brooke, later the first rajah of Sarawak, described the view in 1830 from the bungalow as "a landscape of vast extent, and so

13 Captain Walter Caulfield Lennon, Journal of a Voyage through the Straits of Malacca on an Expedition to the Molucca Islands, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 7 (1881): 54. 14 R. Montgomery Martin, History of the British Colonies (London: Cochrane and McCrone, 1834), Vol. 1, 413; H. Eric Miller, Extracts from the Letters of Col. Nahuijs, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 19 (1941): 200. Is J. Johnson, The Oriental Voyager (London: James Asperne, 1807), 227. 16T. M. Ward, Contributions to the Medical Topography of Prince of Wales Island, or Pulo Pinang, in Official Papers on the Medical Statistics and Topography of Malacca and Prince of Wales' Island and on the Prevailing Diseases of the Tenasserim Coast (Penang: Pinang Government Press, 1830). 17 Thomas Beighton, Penang: Description of the Island, Chinese Repository 3 (1834): 221-230; Robert Elliott, Views in India, China, and on the Shores of the Red Sea (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835), Vol. 2, 38; Dr. Yvan, Six Months among the Malays and a Year in China (London: James Blackwood, 1855), 170-171.




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FIG. 3-The waterfall, shown here in exaggerated splendor, was a favorite resort. Note the clothing of the viewers. Source: Reproduced from an aquatint engraved and published by William Daniell after a painting by Captain Robert Smith (courtesy of India Office Library and Records, London).

diversified that the eye never wearies of gazing."i8 Near Convalescent Bun- galow was the medical officer's residence, which also contained a dispensary for invalids.

18 Gertrude L. Jacob, The Raja of Sarawak: An Account of Sir James Brooke, K.C.B., LL.D., Given Chiefly Through Letters and Journals (London: Macmillan, 1876), Vol. 1, 18.




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FIG. 4-Convalescent Bungalow (right) and Bel Retiro with its flagstaff. Note terraced garden to right of Bel Retiro, plinth on which Convalescent Bungalow rested, building materials, and servants. Source: Elliott, text footnote 17, facing 37.

Slightly below and somewhat to the north of Bel Retiro, on what was generally called Haliburton's Hill, was the spacious bungalow of Thomas Halyburton, a British merchant and sometime sheriff of Prince of Wales Island.19 Another commodious bungalow stood on nearby Strawberry Hill. According to a Dutch visitor in 1824, the summit was graced by "a shady and scented garden of roses and strawberries, whence this spot has derived its name of Strawberry Hill."20 These bungalows, together with others about which little information has survived, were loosely connected by a tree-lined path that ended on the summit of Western Hill, which had been cleared of forest but was not built on or cultivated.

The rounded hill immediately below the upper ridge was linked by a winding path to the track leading up to the hill station, although the bungalow there, called Highlands of Scotland, and cleared land were primarily part of the plantation economy. A temporary hospital occupied the summit of this hill prior to the late 1820s.21 The neighboring hills, including Mount Elvira, lacked direct access to the upper ridge and were too low to be of

19 John Bastin and Pauline Rohatgi, Prints of Southeast Asia in the India Office Library: The East India Company in Malaysia and Indonesia 1786-1824 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1979), 28. 20 Quoted in Bastin and Rohatgi, footnote 19 above, 30. 21 Colonel James Welsh, Military Reminiscences: Extracted from a Journal of Nearly Forty Years' Active Service in the East Indies (London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1830), Vol. 2, 114; Ward, footnote 16 above, 3.




much value to invalids. They occasionally served as places of refuge and resort, but they functionally were not part of the hill station.

Called variously Government Hill, Great Hill, or simply The Hill, the core of the early hill station occupied part of the undulating upper ridge between Fern Hill and the vicinity of Strawberry Hill. This area is still the central, most developed portion of the hill station and has been known as Penang Hill for several decades. Several additional bungalows were erected on or below the crest of the main ridge in the half century or so after 1830, but few other changes occurred before or indeed for some time after the completion of the Penang Hill Railway in the early 1920s.22

A PLACE OF REFUGE

Penang was a death trap for several decades. Of the thirty-four civil servants appointed between 1805 and 1825, twenty died before 1830.23 One person with more than twenty years' experience in the Far East could not recall a sole living European resident of Penang who had arrived before 1829, because almost all of them had died, and sickness occasionally reduced the number of European-born administrators to the minimum.24 Although the medical statistics for early Penang are sparse and unreliable, it is fairly certain that the main causes of mortality and morbidity were malaria, tropical ulcers, infected wounds, and diarrhea and dysentery.25 Europeans also suffered from or were threatened by periodic outbreaks of smallpox and cholera.26

Several factors account for the high incidence of sickness and mortality. Parts of George Town were poorly drained, dirty, and overcrowded. Medical knowledge was rudimentary, and prescribed remedies, including bleeding and use of purgatives, mercury, and emetics, often did more harm than good. Hospitals were crude and unhygienic, and Europeans generally ignored the medical knowledge and adaptive behavior of the Asian cultural groups.27

22Pr&cis of Information Concerning the Straits Settlements and the Native States of the Malay Peninsula (London: Printed at the War Office by Harrison and Sons, 1883), 81; Dennys, footnote 9 above, 283; H. B. Ward, Penang Hill Thirty Years Ago, British Malaya 22 (1947): 298. 23 Walter Hamilton, The East-India Gazetteer (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1828), Vol. 2, 420; Ward,

footnote 16 above, 29. 24 G. F. Davidson, Trade and Travel in the Far East; or Recollections of Twenty-One Years Passed in Java, Singapore, Australia, and China (London: Madden and Malcolm, 1846), 97; T. J. Hovell- Thurlow, The Company and the Crown (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1867), 181. 25 Ward, footnote 16 above, 27-29; J. W. Field, The Changing Pattern of Disease, in The Institute for Medical Research 1900-1950: Studies from the Institute for Medical Research, Federation of Malaya, Jubilee Volume No. 25 (Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, 1951), 89. 26 John Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China; with an Intro- duction by David K. Wyatt (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967 [originally published 1828]), 20-21; Low, footnote 10 above, 318; James Low, An Account of the Origin and Progress of the British Colonies in the Straits of Malacca, Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia 4 (1850): 11-26. 27 James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climate on European Constitutions (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1827), 37-46; Duncan Macpherson, Selections from the Records of the Madras Government; Reports on Mountain and Marine Sanitaria (Madras: Printed by H. Smith, 1862), 288; Gilbert E. Brooke, Medical Works and Institutions, in One Hundred Years of Singapore (edited by Walter Makepeace, Gilbert E. Brooke, and Roland St. J. Braddell; London: John Murray,




Unlike the other Straits Settlements, Penang was blessed with a hilly interior to which invalids could repair. Its benefits were related to certain medical ideas.

External or environmental causes of disease were emphasized in the early nineteenth century, and consequently much attention was given to variations in temperature, wind direction, nearness of water bodies, type of vegetation, and altitude. Especially important was the corruption of ambient air by miasmas emanating from decaying vegetation, swamps, and squalid (read native) living quarters. For example, malaria, which literally means bad air, was considered to result from inhaling noxious emanations.28 Disease was also related to contagion, which was assumed to cause disorders like plague or syphilis, although the true etiology of these and other epidemic diseases remained unknown in the early nineteenth century. A third presumed cause of disease was individual predisposition, which was related to factors such as excessive consumption of alcohol, sexual indulgence, emotional strain, and fatigue.

Many diseases were attributed to pollution of the ambient air. Localities that were low, hot, damp, and inadequately ventilated were considered especially subject to injurious miasmas. Upland areas were healthier because elevation moderated temperature and humidity, two principal reasons for vegetative decay and hence for miasmas, and were generally better ventilated than lowland zones. In short, uplands were better suited to European constitutions, which supposedly degenerated in the lowlands. All observers agreed that Penang Hill was much healthier than the inadequately ventilated lowlands on the island. Patients suffering from fever, dysentery, and hepatic diseases did very well on the hill, according to Ward, although the occurrence of mists and fogs made the hill station less suitable for pulmonary disorders and rheumatism.29 A typical observation noted that the air on the Great Hill was "buoyant, cool, elevating to the spirits, bracing to the nerves, and exciting to the appetite."30

Noxious airborne odors supposedly came from native settlements, which were also thought to harbor contagious diseases like syphilis. Europeans responded by restricting social intercourse with native women and by placing military quarters away from and upwind of native areas. The frequently isolated, purpose-built hill station or upland military cantonment provided even greater segregation from indigenous cultures and their perceived baleful effects.

1921), Vol. 1, 492-496; F. G. Stevens, A Contribution to the Early History of Prince of Wales Island, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 7 (1929): 387. 28 E. T. Renbourn, Seasoning Fluxes and Fevers of Acclimatization: An Introduction to the History of Tropical Adaptation, Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 66 (1963): 193-203; King, footnote 1 above, 102-118. 29 Ward, footnote 16 above, 5. 30John Turnbull Thomson, Some Glimpses into Life in the Far East (London: Richardson and Company, 1864), 70.




It has been argued that most Europeans were loath to adapt certain of their habits to tropical living conditions.31 To what extent then did conser- vatism in matters such as food, drink, clothing, and architecture predispose the British to disease and discomfort? My answer is threefold. Firstly, Eu- ropeans suffered acutely from mosquito-borne and water-borne diseases whose causes were then unknown. Cultural adjustments would have alleviated or eradicated certain disorders, for example, liver complaints associated with alcohol, but epidemic diseases would probably have continued to produce high rates of mortality and morbidity. Secondly, certain habits did change. Evidence includes the several cool, airy houses in the lowlands that were well adapted to local climatic conditions and the fashionable changes in women's clothing. Thirdly, it is easier to describe practices than to explain customs. Consider food and drink. Both were important factors in maintaining social distinctions. Moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages probably posed fewer health hazards than did drinking most potable water, and alcohol was the best available painkiller in the early nineteenth century. A cautious generalization is that the British residents of late Georgian Penang were perhaps less predisposed to disease than were their more staid, culture- bound, and metropolitan-oriented mid-Victorian successors.

How efficacious was Penang Hill as a refuge? A plausible answer is that the place offered psychological respite but had rather limited curative effect on the diseases that the Europeans suffered. It was too low to escape the ravages of Anopheles maculatus, the main vector of malaria in cleared hilly areas to elevations of 1,525 meters above sea level.32 A stint on the hill probably did little for invalids who suffered from dysentery and other in- testinal disorders.

A PLACE OF RESORT

The sociocultural characteristics of colonial society provided the preeminent rationale for tropical hill stations. Medical concepts and health consid- erations had an important role in that rationale, and they largely accounted for the emergence of Penang Hill as a refuge. But the hill station was also a resort, albeit a very small one. This second function was related to certain developments in British metropolitan society. One indication of increased affluence in eighteenth-century England was the rise of socially emulative spending on holidays, music, drama, sports, gardening, and other leisure- time pursuits, all of which became commercialized.33 Of particular impor-

31 Reed, footnote 1 above, 555-556. 32 J. W. Field and J. A. Reid, Malaria: The Historical Background, in The Institute, footnote 25 above, 136; A. A. Sandosham, Vectors of Malaria in Malaya, Medical Journal of Malaya 17 (1962): 101-114. 33 Neil McKendrick, The Commercialization of Fashion, in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (edited by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 34-99; J. H. Plumb, The Commerciali- zation of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England, in The Birth of a Consumer Society, this footnote, 265-285.




tance for the development of hill stations overseas was the rise of specialized urban centers that catered primarily to sojourners in search of leisure and amusement as well as votaries of health and rest. These centers were spas and later seaside resorts.34 Health benefits were assumed to derive from taking the waters and from sea air and bathing, but both types of resort were primarily for social and recreational activities. Hence they had assembly rooms for dances and music, race courses, libraries, and theaters, while other features like promenades or piers promoted alfresco social interaction. Resorts of this sort were the antecedent of the Asiatic hill stations.

To sojourners familiar with the British resorts, Penang Hill had few facilities for amusement and leisure. It was essentially a collection of bungalows and lacked a pub, a club, a race course or cricket grounds, an Anglican church, a public library, shops, or even a native bazaar. In short, Penang Hill had none of the institutions or facilities that characterized even small Indian hill stations. It was a relatively insignificant little belvedere, and today the only buildings there other than bungalows are a hotel, a police station, a post office, a tea kiosk, a tiny mosque, and several minor structures. In spite of the shortcomings, Penang Hill did possess certain attractions, including interesting and diverse topography, splendid scenery, abundant flora and fauna, paths and open spaces for walking and riding, pleasant gardens and secluded bungalows with cool verandas, company of other Europeans, freedom from constraints of lowland authority, and opportunity to escape from the medically baleful and socially restricting presence of non-Euro- peans. Most leisure activities at the hill station were popular in contemporary metropolitan society and took place outdoors.

A trip to the hill station invariably included a visit to the waterfall northwest of George Town, which was a favorite place for picnics and whose wild, rugged grandeur appealed to early-nineteenth-century landscape tastes. The sojourners could continue up the winding path to the hill station, with an occasional stop along the way to admire the ever-expanding view of the lowlands or to inspect the rich diversity of rain-forest flora and fauna.

Typical outdoor activities at the hill station included an early-morning pony ride to Western Hill, where there was ample open space for exercise on foot or on horseback; collecting specimens of local flora and fauna in the surrounding forests; walking or going on picnics or shooting expeditions; painting and sketching; or simply admiring the scenery from a good vantage point.35 Most other leisure activities occurred in a bungalow compound, where they were associated with the veranda, that cool, airy, and raised place where friends were greeted and entertained and where books were read,

34 King, footnote 1 above, 165; John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750- 1914 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983). 35 George Finlayson, The Mission to Siam, and Hue the Capital of Cochin China ... with a Memoir of the Author, by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (London: John Murray, 1826), 19; Ward, footnote 16 above, 3; Thomas W. R. McMahon, My Reminiscences of a Picnic Party at Penang, in the Year 1869 (Calcutta: P. S. D'Rozario and Company, 1871).




letters written, music performed and listened to, and plants potted and tended.

Glimpses of Penang Hill, its clientele, and their activities can be seen in the paintings of Captain Robert Smith and even more vividly in the colored aquatints by William Daniell after Smith's paintings.36 The neoclassical clothing of the clientele has some interest. The illustrations show that one duty of native servants was to ward off the tropical sun with a wide parasol (Fig. 5). The European men wore close-fitted breeches and cutaway jackets, while the women appeared in soft, high-waisted, tubular dresses of comfortable muslin. The women's costumes were cool and airy, while the men's were not, because appearance was dictated by metropolitan fashion that between 1780 and 1820 emphasized a slim, revealing silhouette. It was fashion, not climate, that determined what was worn, and increasingly it was de rigueur to be fashionable.

The basis of the hill station both as a refuge and a resort was the dom- inance-dependence relationship between the small European community and the Asian cultural groups that composed the majority of the population. Although Chinese immigrants had an important economic role, land, labor, and capital were primarily controlled by Europeans, and their monopoly was reflected in the way that the hill station was sustained and maintained. Virtually everything had to be hauled to Penang Hill from the lowlands- invalids and their accoutrements, fresh food, prepared drinks and medicines, household goods, ornamental plants, and even vegetative mold for the gardens. The flow of goods, services, and labor was essentially unidirectional, and it was largely parasitic on lowland land and life. Food was supplied by Chinese gardeners and Malay farmers. Labor came chiefly from Malays and Tamils who worked as porters, gardeners, sweepers, dhobis, cooks, and household servants. The lifestyles of the exclusively European hill-station clientele were sustained by the dualism that characterized colonial society.

LANDSCAPE

Bungalow compounds and their gardens were the main cultural forms in the landscape of the hill station. The senior company officers came from the middle and upper-middle classes of the finely graded metropolitan society, and among the landscape tastes and preferences that they brought to Penang Hill were a love of the informal or "natural" landscape garden, a Romantic nostalgia for rural life, a preference for picturesque landscapes, and an expanding interest in exotic plants. Evidence for this statement comes from paintings, from various mentions of nature and landscape in topo- graphical works, and from what is much better known about the British in

36 Mildred Archer, An Artist Engineer-Colonel Robert Smith in India (1805-1830), Connoisseur 179 (1972): 78-88; Bastin and Rohatgi, footnote 19 above, 16-34; Raymond Head, From Obsession to Obscurity: Colonel Robert Smith: Artist, Architect and Engineer, Country Life 166 (1981): 1432-1434.




FIG. 5-Admiring the view from Haliburton's Hill. Note the servant with a parasol and the clothing of the two European men. Source: Reproduced from an aquatint engraved and published by William Daniell after a painting by Captain Robert Smith (courtesy of India Office Library and Records, London).

their homeland and in India. More than any other landscape feature, the garden expressed nostalgia for that homeland. The garden not only displayed cultural landscape memories but also maintained and reinforced the identity and the separateness of the colonial community.3

Most of the early civil and military officials in Penang were posted from India, where the standard residential unit of the British community was the detached bungalow in its own compound. The officials had servants, who had separate quarters behind or to the side of the bungalow where the kitchen was also located. The bungalow originated as a distinctive dwelling type in India, where the earliest prototypes were probably the indigenous huts of rural Bengal. Europeans adopted and adapted the type to accord with their own social and cultural preferences. With the expansion of colonialism, the form spread to many parts of the world. 39

37 David Lowenthal and Hugh C. Prince, English Landscape Tastes, Geographical Review 55 (1965): 186-222; Mildred Archer, English Gardens in India, Country Life 152 (1967): 1120-1123; Mildred Archer, The Intimate Picturesque c. 1810-25, in India Observed: India as Viewed by British Artists 1760-1860 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1982), 70-73; Nicolette Scourse, The Victorians and Their Flowers (London: Croom Helm, 1983),95-119; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 192-241. 38Anthony D. King, The Colonial Bungalow-Compound Complex: A Study in the Cultural Use of Space, Journal of Architectural Research 3 (1974): 37. 39Sten Nilsson, European Architecture in India 1750-1850 (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 186- 190; Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 14-64.




A bungalow in early-nineteenth-century Penang was a hill dwelling for temporary use by Europeans. The term was rarely applied to their residences in the lowlands. The only instance of its application to non-European structures in Penang, to the best of my knowledge, was a statement in a revealing description of George Town: "The various styles of buildings [produced] a strange effect-the European house, the Hindoo bungalow, the Malay cot- tage, the Chinese dwelling . . . are mingled together without regularity, and apparently without any plan."40 The hill dwellings were invariably referred to as bungalows, and no doubt significantly Wathen referred to one as a commodious dwelling "of that class," in other words, a distinctive type of dwelling.

Linkages between Penang and Madras were especially strong, and it is possible that the form of the typical early Penang Hill bungalow was introduced from that part of India. This thesis receives tentative support from the comment that "the garden-houses and bungalows were erected [in Pen- ang] in the same manner, and with similar materials, as they are near Madras.... "41 I have investigated the possibility that the bungalow form was derived from a house type in the adjacent lowlands. The sources permit only a very tentative thesis that the Malay stilt house of timber and thatch with a pyramidal roof and a gallery along one or more sides may have influenced the bungalow form or at least certain features of it. Some early European arrivals adopted the Malay house, but a sketch of one made in 1811 shows it to be different from the bungalow in both size and plan.42

Company bungalows with names of English, Scottish, or literary prove- nance preempted the scenically most attractive and airy sites on the upper ridge (Fig. 6). Social status and elevation were in tandem: the governor's bungalow, Bel Retiro, occupied the most-commanding site atop the hill, with the bungalows of lesser officials and merchants below. The bungalows were commodious and similar in plan. They sat on slightly raised plinths or on low brick pillars. They had mud or woven-mat walls, pyramidal thatched- covered roofs, and deep verandas supported by slender wooden pillars around the entire building. They were equipped with glass windows against the vicissitudes of the weather, according to Ward, and the verandas were protected from heat and glare by split green-bamboo screens or chicks that could be rolled up when not in use. Intended for temporary occupation, the bungalows were only partially furnished.43 Each bungalow was surrounded by a spacious compound that was demarcated by fences of linked hurdles or screens of trees and shrubs to ensure privacy and seclusion. A large area

40 James Wathen, Journal of a Voyage, in 1811 and 1812, to Madras and China (London: J. Nichols, Son, and Bentley ... and Black, Parry, and Company, 1814), 146. 41 Wathen, footnote 40 above, 132. 42 Johnson, footnote 15 above, 226; Lennon, footnote 13 above, 53; C. N. Parkinson, The Homes of Malaya, Malayan Historical Journal 2 (1955): 123-125; Michael Sullivan, Sketches of Penang by James Wathen in the Collections of the University of Malaya Art Museum, Malaya in History 3 (1957): 113. 43 Ward, footnote 16 above, 5; Kinloch, footnote 9 above, 9.




Cazalet, 1856. Note form of the bungalows, building materials, deep verandas, and chicks. Source: Author's collection.

around each bungalow was allotted to a garden, servants' quarters, and a kitchen; the open space also admitted light and allowed ventilation. The result was a privately controlled, more or less self-contained milieu whose existence was largely dependent on the labor and the services of Asians.

The form and composition of European gardens in Penang reflected metropolitan tastes and local conditions. Most of the bungalow gardens on the hill were small, modest creations, although they were praised for their tastefulness." They were usually constricted by the steeply sloping local topography, and the garden at Bel Retiro comprised a series of sharply descending terraces. A garden mainly contained a lawnlike green sward, various shrubs, a small number of the original rain-forest trees,, scattered flower beds, climbing plants on trellises, and potted plants both on and around verandas. Some gardens were stocked with exotic plants, among them pineapples and sunflowers, two New World plants with a long history in Southeast Asia; roses, strawberries, and other flowers and fruits from temperate climates that reminded the hill-station clientele of home; and a selection of flora that was probably introduced from India and Burma, the

4" Ward, footnote 16 above, 4.




FIG. 7-Strawberry Hill. The large tree was probably a remnant of the original rain forest. Note sunflowers and pineapples in the flower bed, the closely cropped lawn with scattered shrubs, and clothing of the two European women. Source: Reproduced from an aquatint engraved and published by William Daniell after a painting by Captain Robert Smith (courtesy of India Office Librazy and Records, London).

hinterlands of Macao and Canton, and the Moluccas (Fig. 7).4 The range of plants in most gardens was predictably small. Steep slopes, thin soils, many pests, lack of horticultural skills, and temporary occupation combined to retard the development of hill gardens. The garden at Bel Retiro was one of the few that received more or less constant attention.

Siting, demarcation, content,, and arrangement of the bungalow compounds embodied and reflected social status, private or company control of space and labor, preferred visual experiences, and a desire for privacy and separateness. The garden was a particularly important means of maintaining self-identity, while temperate-climatic flora evoked nostalgia. Together with a network of tracks and paths and a mosaic of open and wooded spaces, the bungalow compound provided the setting for the activities and lifestyle of the peripatetic hill-station sojourners.

45Low, footnote 10 above, 314; I. H. Burkill, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1935), Vol. 1, 148-150, Vol. 2, 1131-1132; E. H. M. Cox, Plant Hunting in China: A History of Botanical Exploration in China and the Tibetan Marches (London: Oldbourne, 1961 [originally published 1945]), 34-69; Alice M. Coats, The Plant Hunters: Being a History of the Horticultural Pioneers, Their Quests and Their Discoveries from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 87-101, 142-153, 205.




CLOSING COMMENTS

Penang Hill was a sociocultural product of the dominant European colonial community in an alien and distant milieu. The interaction of selected representatives of the metropolitan society with the particular biophysical characteristics of the location yielded a cultural landscape in which the bungalow compound was the main artifact. The bungalow symbolized cultural transfer from India, while the layout and composition of the garden reflected local conditions, metropolitan tastes, and possibly the movement of horticultural ideas from India.

Penang Hill was a place. In one perspective it had location, extent, internal arrangement, built forms, temporary residents, a single connection with other places, and two functions. From a second perspective the experiences of hill- station clientele created places at different scales: the hill station as a separate, bounded space, demarcated compounds, gardens, named bungalows, and encasing verandas. However, little can be concluded about such places as centers of meaning. A third perspective reveals that Penang Hill was a place apart, a little outpost of empire in an alien cultural realm. By standing apart from lowland life, the hill station symbolized European power and domi- nance, albeit in a somewhat minor fashion.

Early Penang Hill served a small, relatively isolated European community that was informal in its social relationships, still partially open to Indian, Malay, and other cultural influences, and still largely free of the narrowness of mind that characterized middle-class Victorian society. The hill bungalows eventually acquired an overlay of fashionable architectural details or were replaced by more substantial structures, and the gardens became more elab- orate and showy with the passage of time. The trend was toward formality and stiffness, the scene resembling more closely the ideal of home.



Documents

Early Penang Hill Station