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Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion (built 1870 onward)

This grand house was built in the 1890s for Cheong Fatt Tze (1840-1917), the preeminent Chinese businessman of his era. Born in the small village of Tai Pu in the Teochew district of China, Cheong Fatt Tze showed little promise in his youth, and a spiteful uncle joked that he would hang lanterns in front of his house upside down (an unforgivable act) if Cheong ever achieved fame. The uncle was forced to carry this out when Cheong became rich.

Cheong's big break came in Jakarta when he was taken under the wing of a rich merchant and made an adoptive son. In the 1850s, Cheong founded a steamship line operating between Medan, North Sumatra, and Penang. This proved a success, and Cheong made further investments in trade goods, banking, mining, and textiles. As business blossomed, Cheong found himself under the eyes of the Manchu Chinese government, who offered him a series of government positions in an attempt to promote mutual interests in Southeast Asia. The Empress Dowager elevated him to a Mandarin of the Highest Order and Special Trade Commissioner for Southeast Asia. After the overthrow of the Manchus, the subsequent Republican government continued to seek his services in an advisory role.

Having lived as an overseas Chinese in a British colony among Malays, Indians, and fellow Chinese, Cheong's artistic sensibilities tended toward the cosmopolitan. This multicultural background proved an inspiration to the mansion that Cheong had constructed at the north end of Leith Street in Penang. This enormous house, constructed over a seven year span from 1890-97, was ostensibly Chinese, but incorporates architectural influences from across the globe. Broadly, the overall form of the mansion is a courtyard house with wings. The central portion of the house is defined by its massive gables, which are crowned in Hakka-Teochew style with representations of the five elements--earth, fire, water, wood, and metal.

It is appropriate that these representations take center stage since the entire house is informed by feng-shui principles that derive from the study of the five elements. Before constructing the house, Cheong would have sought the advice of a feng shui master in all aspects of the design. We can see this unknown master's handiwork in the fact that the house is turned away from a natural southern orientation to Leith street and angled somewhat eastward to catch the rays of the rising sun. In compromising between orienting the house straight east or turning it south toward Leith street, the plan of the house was settled almost at a 45 degree angle to the cardinal directions, so that the corners of the house face the four directions instead of the four facades. Feng shui requirements also demanded that the house "lie off the dragon's back", which in practical terms meant that the house had to sit on a slope with the rear areas higher than the front. Since the terrain around Leith street is essentially flat, Cheong solved this problem by setting the rear portion of the house on an eleven inch plinth. Although this may seem to be an arrogant and artificial solution, it was one with long precedent throughout Asia. For thousands of years, inauspicious topography was often corrected with pagodas and pavilions at key positions to better channel the beneficial forces deriving from nature.

According to feng shui, it is vital that all houses have access to ample breezes and the flow of water to allow natural energies to properly circulate. Cheong solved the problem of air by creating a large central courtyard flanked by four smaller courtyards in between the main house and the two wings. This allowed light and air to reach even the deepest corners. The water problem was solved by the courtyards as well. The designers installed hidden water pipes inside the walls of the house so that rainwater would flow around the courtyards through the walls of the house and emerge at the base of the courtyards before draining out the front of the house. This effect is particularly striking in the central courtyard, where two apertures placed diagonally across from each other on the floor cause the rainwater to spiral around the courtyard before draining away.

The constant flow of air and water was a dynamic means of ensuring the house's vitality. By contrast, a static means employed was the use of numerology to imbue the house with special favor. For example, the establishment of a square courtyard at the center of the house created an uneasy situation since the number four rhymes with "death" in several Chinese dialects. Cheong solved this problem by placing double columns at each corner of the courtyard, turning it nominally into an eight-sided space. In the design of the side wings, too, numerology plays a central role. Each floor of each wing has six rooms since this rhymes with the saying "lok lok tai soon", which means "smoothness with every dealing".

At the scale of individual rooms, further good fortune is conveyed by propitious sayings painted on doorways and elaborate, colorful murals that depict scenes from nature and Chinese opera. It is for these murals that the house is particularly well known. The murals are not painted on, but constructed in three dimensions with multicolored shards of broken porcelain bowls. This technique, called "Chien Nien", was a specialty of Cheong's native Fujian and Teochew homeland, and it was used throughout the house to decorate wall surfaces, gables, and ridgelines.

The near-demise of the mansion:

When Cheong constructed his mansion at the end of the 19th century, he hoped that it would be inhabited over time by nine generations of his family. This was not to be. When Cheong was 74 he sired a son, named Kam Loong, with his 7th wife and died a few years later. His will stipulated that the house would remain in the hands of Kam Loong until his death and could not be sold until that time. Unfortunately, Kam Loong and his wife, Thoong Siew Mee, spent little on maintenance and allowed the house to fall into ruin. Over time, the couple allowed up to thirty squatter families to settle in the house so that they could collect rent. By the time Kam Loong died in 1989, the house had fallen into severe disrepair. Prospects for the house seemed very grim, especially since it came on the market for the first time in accordance with the will of Kam Loong's long-dead father.

With demolition of the house a real possibility, a coalition of preservations managed to gather the funds to purchase the dwelling. Over the next few years they invested heavily in the future of the house, calling in experts from several countries to achieve a total restoration.