Last week I attended the 130th birthday party of the oldest lady in Penang. Actually she looked pretty good for her age, silver haired maybe but still elegant and with that aura of self-acceptance that makes someone really attractive whatever their age. Naturally, she’s had some “work” done over the decades, a facelift or two, and more than one re-think of her hair and clothes. She’s been in the wars (quite literally) and suffered bankruptcy and other misfortunes but she’s carried on carrying on. She’s also had multiple husbands, if one can think of owners in this light for, of course, I speak of the “grande dame” of Penang – the venerable E&O Hotel.

She started out as a mere slip of a girl with the Sarkies, a flamboyant threesome of Armenian brothers, who knew how to party. Actually there were two hotels in those days – the Eastern and the Oriental – and they were brought together under one roof. During the First World War, the Captain of the Russian cruiser Zhemchug slipped ashore for a little R and R in one of the E&O’s suites. In the early hours of the morning he was horrified to see, from the safety of his private balcony, his ship torpedoed and sunk by the enemy vessel, the Emden. After the mad days of the 1920s, which brought the hotel almost to the point of financial collapse, she entered a more staid, colonial time of dance nights on Fridays and Saturdays and “mail boat days” – presumably the arrival of the post potentially brought good news in the form of cheques. There was tea on the verandah and there were whisky stengahs under the famous “whispering dome” where you could hear conversations with absolute clarity from across the room. There was even an Otis lift, one of the first in Malaya. During the Second World War, the E&O was taken over by the Japanese Army of Occupation. Just before their arrival it’s said that the canny hotel staff destroyed all the alcohol on the premises so that the invading soldiers wouldn’t get drunk and start behaving badly.

After the end of the war, the E&O herself needed a little rehab before she could re-launch herself as the premier hotel in Penang during the Emergency and the run-up to independence. I remember sitting as a very small child on the famous 900-foot waterfront sea wall, watching adults sip a nasty-tasting drink which they called beer. But we had left Penang when in the mid- ’60s, the hotel staff went on strike and all the lights went out literally. Surviving this crisis, the hotel carried on until the 1990s when it was really in need of a thorough overhaul and it was closed for five years. By then the people of Penang were more conservation aware and insisted that, whoever were the legal owners of the hotel, the E&O in fact belongs to Penang. The resulting renovation, both sympathetic to the past but with an eye to the future, opened at the beginning of the new millennium and continues to attract people from all over the world.

Of course, ageing in Asia is a much better proposition than ageing is in the West. In Europe, you become invisible after a certain age, but in Asia, your age engenders a certain level of respect. This is probably one of the hidden reasons why so many retirees are heading towards Asia. It’s almost something in the air, you might describe it as “friendliness” or “courtesy” but it’s more than either of those. It’s a feeling that you may be ageing and are perhaps frail, but you still matter. Nonetheless, for those wanting to delay the ageing process then there are excellent options available nowadays. They range from surgery to “face yoga” – exercises designed to counteract the facial muscles’ natural tendency to head south. Not wanting to go under the knife myself I have been having a “non-surgical face lift” consisting of quite painful massages to the face to remove blockages and promote a more youthful appearance. The results? It’s too early to say but there is some promise. So I am celebrating with changing the photograph which accompanies this column for a newer one. However, if you should see me doing my “face yoga” while stationary at one of Penang’s traffic lights, please look the other way. The expressions can be a little alarming!

One thing that the E&O Hotel has never done is retire. Perhaps that’s part of keeping her youthful outlook on life. But she does have one ambition not yet fulfilled. Although she has hosted writers, artists, musicians, and actors, she hasn’t been a leading lady herself. Now with the confirmation of the second season of “Indian Summers”, the Channel 4 series set in Imperial Simla but filmed in Penang, isn’t it time that she had a cameo role?

The E&O Hotel, Pearl of Penang by Ilsa Sharpe, published by Marshall Cavendish

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Source: The Expat Magazine April 2015