Manicasothy Saravanamuttu was a Ceylonese who arrived in Penang to become the editor of the Straits Echo newspaper in 1931. He lived an extraordinary life and suffered the Japanese Occupation of Penang personally. His experiences during the War years and beyond were documented in his memoir, The Sara Saga, which was originally published by Cathay Printers in 1970. I recall that the former Chief Reporter of Straits Echo in the 1970s, G Ratnam, used to mention a lot about Saravanamuttu. The out-of-print book was reprinted by Areca Books in 2010 and it can still be purchased from the Areca Books website. Price is only RM40, which I consider to be very good value for a precious re-print.
I can't remember when I purchased a copy of this book: it could have been soon after the reprint became available but like many other books I own, they normally ended up in the cupboard unread until I really have a use for them. So it was with The Sara Saga. Recently, I brought it out for some air because I had to refer to the chapters on the Japanese occupancy of Penang, this year being the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Penang.
There's also a chapter on Penang's personalities, another area of history that continues to intrigue me. Turning to page 78, my attention was immediately rivetted to the picture of Towkay Yeap Chor Ee and Malcolm MacDonald. Now recently, Yeap Chor Ee had been a subject of interest to me as he was the founder of Ban Hin Lee Bank.
I thought that I had already known quite a bit about him from public records, private conversations and also from the book, The King's Chinese, which was authored by one of the Towkay's great-granddaughters, Daryl Yeap. However, I discovered that Saravanamuttu's memoir also contained some details of Yeap Chor Ee's generosity that was unknown to me earlier. It was this generosity which made Yeap Chor Ee so well-known in Penang even decades after his death in 1952.
Below, I reproduce an excerpt from the Saravanamuttu memoir that dealt with Yeap Chor Ee. But overall, The Sara Saga is a most interesting book on many important periods of Penang's past and a must for any student of local history to own. Click here to visit the Areca Books website.
Perhaps the most outstanding Chinese in Penang in those days was Towkay Yeap Chor Ee, who came to Penang as a penniless orphan at the age of 18. He was in his fifties when I arrived in Penang, and he was already the richest man in the settlement. His wealth was acquired by hard work, thrift and a fair share of good luck.
He first started with a small shop in Prangin Road, which was stocked with goods on consignment supplied through the good office of the compradore of one of the leading British importing houses of Penang. Young Yeap Chor Ee kept the accounts scrupulously and settled with his patron without fail at the end of each month. In this manner he built up a small capital. At that time Caledonia Estate in Province Wellesley was a sugarcane plantation and produced crude sugar. Yeap Chor Ee purchased stocks of this crude sugar and sent them to the refineries of the famous Java Sugar King, Oei Tjiong Ham, at Sourabaya, and sold the refined sugar in Penang at a substantial profit.
The story is told that Oei, sensing that the young man in Penang was likely to become a rival to him, did not submit the bills for the refining for an extended period. But Yeap Chor Ee, with that strict honesty which was an integral part of his make-up, deposited the cost of refining from the profits of his sales in the bank instead of, as in the accepted manner, reinvesting it to make more profit and thereby run the risk of losing it. Thus, the Sugar King suddenly presented a bill for some $2 million, expecting to find the young Penang businessman unable to pay and thereby take over his business. To his surprise, the full bill was promptly settled. Oei Tjiong Ham at once came to Penang to call on this remarkable young businessman and a friendship was established which culminated in two of his daughters marrying two of Yeap Chor Ee's sons. Another justification of the old adage: "Honesty is the best policy"!
Then came the rubber boom of the 1910s in which Yeap Chor Ee speculated with outstanding success and was soon acknowledged as one of the leading businessmen in Penang. He acquired considerable property following the old Chinese belief that land was the safest investment and was justified when after his death some of his lands fetched over a thousand times what he had paid for them.
He showed his faith in the future of Penang by putting up the magnificent Ban Hin Lee Bank building during the days of the "Great Slump" in the early 1930s. Another notable action of his in those days was when the tin price hit the bottom. He continued to buy on the falling market and at one time held as much as 2,000 tons of tin in his godown. When the price of tin began to rise after hitting the bottom at £170, he sold in small parcels at a time. It is said that he cleared nearly $2 million on this transaction alone.
Till the time of his death Towkay Yeap Chor Ee could not speak English and I remember when, in recognition for his donation of $10,000 to the Silver Jubilee Fund, I tried to secure for him naturalisation papers as a British subject but failed owing to his lack of knowledge of English. By that time, he had established his own bank and was one of the largest property owners in Penang.
My first contact with him was in 1932, soon after the Japanese invaded China. Some of his jealous business rivals started a story that he was a Taiwanese (native of Taiwan or Formosa, which was then under Japanese rule) and there was a movement to boycott his business. As editor of the local paper I was invited to call on him and when I went to his bank he threw his Chinese passport at me. It showed that he was born in Fukien Province. Taiwan was part of Fukien Province before the Japanese took it over and this was made the basis for the false report.
I asked Towkay Yeap to give me his passport, made a block of the page giving his place of birth and printed the picture in the Straits Echo the next day without any further comment. Many Chinese thought that, in the accepted Chinese custom, I had received a handsome present for doing this but I did it merely as a piece of truthful reporting. I think it was this that won me his confidence and he used to consult me often after that whenever he was in doubt over a public matter.
Later I was able to persuade him to give a donation of $100,000, which he later increased to $250,000, for the Chinese section of the library of the University of Malaya in Singapore, now renamed the Singapore University, a proposal that was attractive to him as a non-English speaking Chinese.
The story behind this donation bears repeating. The Resident Commissioner of Penang, i.e. the Head of Administration, was Arthur Aston, an Oxford contemporary of mine and a typical old colonial type. When the appeal for donations to the proposed University in Singapore came out in 1948 Aston sent for Towkay Yeap and blandly suggested he should give a donation of a million dollars! (Incidentally, one of his sons, Dato Yeap Hock Hoe, later donated a million dollars to the Penang University College). When Towkay Yeap made a counter offer of $10,000, Aston was very rude to him and told him he was not going to carry all his millions with him to his grave; all he would get was a stone over his head. Now to speak of his death to an old Chinese (Yeap Chor Ee was over 70 at the time) is considered very bad luck.
The old man sent for me and told me the story. I was very angry and offered to go and scold Aston. His reaction was typical of the old Malayan Chinese. He said, "Don't do that. He may get annoyed, but you can tell him that I was very hurt." Then he went on to say that the biggest donation for the University so far was $50,000 by Lee Kong Chian, a Singapore millionaire, and he was willing to cap it with a donation of $75,000. On the spur of the moment I replied, "Towkay, 10,000, 50,000 and 75,000 are all five figures. Why not be the first to give a six-figure donation?" The old man twigged it at once and readily consented. Remembering his lack of knowledge of English, I suggested that he should specify his donation be utilised for books for the Chinese section of the University Library and a plaque placed to perpetuate his name. This pleased him immensely. So I went over Aston's head and made the offer direct to Malcolm MacDonald, who was Chairman of the Donations Committee. The latter came down to Penang to accept the cheque personally from Towkay Yeap. And I made Aston sanction the grant of a private burial ground for Towkay Yeap and his family, which could be done only for outstanding public service, When he died in 1952, he was buried on this plot on a hill in his Green Lane Estate from where he could look down on the bank he established.
- Quah Seng Sun is one of three people who manage this WPS blogsite. Read more about him here.
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