Penang and the Slow Asian Heritage I Keep Coming Back To

Originally shared on Facebook · May 2019 · George Town, Penang — first of two visits that year

Penang is one of those places I keep returning to without quite planning to. I went in May 2019. I went again in June. Both times I told myself I would only stay a few days. Both times I stayed longer. George Town is a small UNESCO city that does not work very hard to impress you, which is exactly why it does.

If you have done the major Southeast Asian cities — Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, KL — and you are looking for somewhere slower, older, and visibly multicultural, Penang is the answer.

Why George Town Got Its UNESCO Listing

George Town’s UNESCO World Heritage status (granted in 2008, jointly with Melaka) is not really about a single monument. It is about the whole city. Shophouses, clan houses, Chinese temples, mosques, Hindu temples, colonial-era civic buildings, and a street grid that has barely changed since the 19th century. Penang sat at the crossroads of the Straits of Malacca trade routes for two centuries. Chinese, Indian, Malay, and European communities all left their architecture on top of each other.

Walk a single street — Armenian Street, for example — and you will pass a Chinese clan association, a 100-year-old shophouse turned into a coffee shop, a small Indian restaurant, a Hokkien temple, and one of the famous street murals. None of it is a museum piece. People still live here.

The Street Art Is Better Than It Has Any Right to Be

George Town’s street art started as a 2012 commission by Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic to celebrate the city’s heritage. It snowballed. Today the murals — and the wrought-iron caricatures by Sculpture at Work scattered through the old town — are part of the city’s identity. The most famous ones (the kids on a bicycle, the boy on the chair) are everywhere on Instagram. The good news is the second-tier murals, away from the main lanes, are often more interesting and you can photograph them without queueing.

I usually walk Penang street art slowly. Two or three murals an hour. Coffee in between. That is the right pace. Trying to “see them all” misses the point of the city.

Penang Food: The Best in Malaysia, and It Is Not Close

If you have one priority in Penang, make it food.

Char kuey teow (flat noodles, prawns, blood cockles, Chinese sausage, chives, wok-fired in pork lard) is a dish people argue about. Penang’s version, made on the street by people who have been doing it for thirty years, is the version. Assam laksa — sour fish noodle soup with mint, ginger flower, and tamarind — is unique to Penang and is one of the great noodle soups in Asia. Hokkien mee, curry mee, lor bak, oyster omelette, cendol, ais kacang. Every one of these is at hawker centres for under 10 ringgit.

The Indian Muslim food is its own category. Nasi kandar — rice with a selection of curries — is a Penang invention. The original places (Line Clear, Hameediyah) are open until 3 a.m. and have been serving the same plates for decades. Roti canai for breakfast. Murtabak for dinner. Teh tarik any time.

The Indian South Indian food, around Little India, is some of the best banana leaf rice you will eat outside of Tamil Nadu.

This is a food city. Three meals a day, four if you can manage it, and you will still leave with a list of things you did not get to.

The Clan Houses

The Khoo Kongsi (Khoo clan house) is the photograph everyone takes. It deserves it. Built in 1906, restored in the 1990s, it is one of the most ornate Chinese clan temples in Southeast Asia. The Cheah, Yeoh, Lim, and Tan clan houses are all worth a visit. Each one is a slightly different version of the same idea — a wealthy Chinese family that built a clan compound around a temple to anchor a community.

The clan jetties (Chew Jetty, Lim Jetty, Tan Jetty) on the waterfront are the residential version. Wooden walkways out into the water with houses still inhabited by descendants of the families who built them. They are touristic now but they are also still real. People live there.

Outside the Old Town: Penang Hill, Kek Lok Si, and the Beaches

You can spend a whole trip inside George Town and not be wrong, but a few half-day excursions are worth it.

Penang Hill, accessed by funicular, gives you a cool view of the island and George Town from 800 metres up. Go in the morning before the haze.

Kek Lok Si is the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia. The complex is built into a hillside, with pagodas, statues, and a 30-metre bronze Kuan Yin at the top. It is large, slightly chaotic, and at Chinese New Year it lights up in a way that has to be seen.

The beaches at Batu Ferringhi, on the north coast of the island, are fine. They are not Phuket. They are not the Perhentians. They are 30 minutes from George Town and they exist.

Why I Keep Coming Back

Penang has a quality that places like Singapore traded away decades ago — it has not been polished into a single, marketable surface. The shophouses still have peeling paint. The hawker centres still have plastic stools. The clan houses are not behind glass. The food is the food, not “Asian fusion.” The history is layered without being curated for visitors.

It is also genuinely multicultural in the everyday sense. Friday calls to prayer drift across streets where people are buying char kuey teow. Indian Hindu festivals close roads that lead to Chinese temples. Malay families sit at hawker centres next to Hokkien grandfathers. Nobody is performing it for the tourist economy. It is just how the city works.

That, more than the food and the architecture, is why I keep returning.

Practical Information: Visiting George Town, Penang

• Best time: December to April — dry, less humid. Avoid haze season (sometimes Aug–Oct)
• Get there: Direct flights from Bangkok, KL, Singapore, and most regional hubs into Penang International Airport (PEN)
• Stay: Inside George Town’s UNESCO zone — Love Lane, Armenian Street, Chulia Street area. Plenty of restored heritage hotels.
• Eat: Char kuey teow at Lorong Selamat, assam laksa at Air Itam market, nasi kandar at Line Clear, banana leaf rice in Little India
• Don’t miss: Khoo Kongsi clan house, the clan jetties, Penang Hill at sunrise, Kek Lok Si
• Budget: Mid-range hotels 150–300 MYR, meals from 8–25 MYR. One of the best-value heritage cities in Asia.
• Length: 4 days minimum to do the city properly. A week if you want to slow down.

If you are travelling Asia and looking for a slower, older, more multicultural counterpoint to the big-city itinerary, Penang earns the detour. I have been back twice in one year and I would go again tomorrow.

Sebastien H. Brousseau is a Canadian lawyer, permanent resident of Thailand since 2014, and founder of ThaiLawOnline.com. He has lived in Thailand continuously since 2006 and writes about travel, culture, and life in Southeast Asia.