![\"penang05\"](\"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/penang05.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAs a free port whose development turned a sparsely populated island into one of the biggest cities in Southeast Asia, it attracted traders from all over Asia.<\/p>\n
For most of its history, Penang\u00a0was a majority Chinese city.\u00a0Only recently have the Malay drew level with the Chinese — both groups now constitute about 40% of the population. Besides these two dominant groups, colonial Penang hosted a large contingent of Indians, British, Armenian, Jewish and many other peoples from around the world.<\/p>\n
The different people didn’t mingle much beyond the marketplace, echoing the “plural society” Furnivall saw in Rangoon.<\/p>\n
Post-independence Burma dealt with the problems of this plural society by driving out hundreds of thousands of Indians and Chinese. In Malaysia demographic realities were obviously very different.<\/p>\n
And almost two centuries of (almost<\/a>) peaceful co-existence between these different groups has made Penang one of the most multicultural cities I have ever been to. And the food…<\/p>\n A comparison between Penang and Rangoon seems interesting at any rate (on top of the analysis<\/a> I attempted comparing Kuala Lumpur and Yangon), and this book<\/a> should hopefully soon be in my library.<\/p>\n Several large Chinese clans migrated here, including the Khoo, whose clan house is one of the best sights in the city. I stayed right next to it on Armenian Street, itself a beautiful stretch of mainly Chinese shophouses.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Heritage architecture re-interpreted… There surely is a larger body of architectural source material than in Yangon. However, I did not see a dedicated architectural guide, but then I didn’t look very hard either.<\/p>\n There certainly were some interesting postwar structures, although Penang obviously lacks the symbolism of KL’s Merdeka architecture<\/a>. \u00a0 I had the chance to visit Penang for the first time last week. What a fantastic city. I rode the bike a lot\u00a0and probably had my best Chinese meal ever. I definitely want to come back for more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3818"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3853,"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3818\/revisions\/3853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benbansal.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n
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