Passadhi at Penang Hill

Green House. The first thing that comes to the mind of people nowadays are the two hawker centres or coffee shops in Burmah Road that adopt this name. But I'm not referring to them. The original Green House, would you believe it, was located up Penang Hill.

Or to be more exact, halfway up Penang Hill, accessible by the Penang Hill Railway.

Of course, in the old days when the funicular railway was split into two tracks, the Middle Station was a mandatory stop when passengers were required to change from one train to the other. One train would ply between the Lower Station and the Middle Station, while the other train plied between the Middle Station and the Upper Station.

Nowadays, the trains seldom stop at the Middle Station anymore because there is no need for them to stop. Since 2011, it's one continuous track from top to bottom. Only those trains that leave the Lower or Upper stations on the hour will stop here for residents to get on or off.

So there I was waiting with my wife - and two friends, Heng Swee and Alice - at the Lower Station on the 10th of this month. We were met by a couple, Ian and Bin, who were going to lead us to the Green House. We took the train up till the Middle Station, got off there and walked for about 200 metres along a track before reaching a long flight of steps to climb up to the old property.

"There used to be a suspension bridge linking the station to the bungalow," Ian explained to me, "but through decades of neglect, the bridge has collapsed and disappeared."

The 80-plus years-old Green House used to be the hillside holiday retreat of Ong Keng Seng (b 1898, d 1963) to get away from the hustle and bustle of the town. Ong was a well-known Penang trader and businessman. He started the Tai Tong & Co which later became Saw Seng Kew & Co, and was the chairman of the Kwong Wah Yit Poh newspaper. He was involved in the Kuomintang during the pre-war period and helped found a number of Penang organisations such as the Rubber Trade Association, Li Tek Seah, Philomatic Society and Lam Wah Ee Hospital. He was a promiment member of the Ong clan community. In education, he presided over the school boards of Chung Ling High School and Penang Chinese Girls' High School, and was involved in the boards of many other Chinese schools in Penang.

When he died in 1963, Green House was among his estate that was left to his many sons and daughters. Through the decades, however, few took interest in the upkeep of this bungalow and it fell into deep neglect and was later abandoned to the elements. When we visited the place earlier this month, we saw the depth of its neglect. Termites had attacked the property in several places and the balconies were in danger of collapse. Totally unsafe for anyone to tread on. A fall would mean tumbling down 20, 30 feet down the slopes.

Green House actually consisted of two main timber bungalow buildings, an upper bungalow and a lower bungalow, sitting on a quarter acre piece of land. The upper building had been rehabilitated somehow but not the lower one. But at least, the partitions in the lower bungalow had been torn down to leave the four walls standing. On the interior of all four walls, we read graffiti that had been left by holidaymakers, principally students, who had camped there overnight in the 1980s.

Here was where Ian and Bin come into the picture. Bin is one of the grand-daughters of Ong Keng Seng and she learnt that unless something was done to Green House, there was a danger that the state government could ultimately confiscate the property. So she set into motion a plan to ask her relatives, those sharing the title deed to Green House, to donate the place and turn it into a Buddhist meditation centre. And this was how the Passadhi Buddhist Meditation Society came into being about two years ago.

Admittedly, the partial rehabilitation of Green House has been long and arduous. Above the upper bungalow, the heavy rains of last November 2017 caused a minor landslip that brought the earth crashing down. Workers were employed to clear the soil and the slope then reinforced with waterproofing and concrete. Subsequently, a new kitchen was built. There are also four new kuti huts for visiting Buddhist monks of all denominations, and presently there is a resident Mahayana monk, Venerable Xin Shen, staying in one of them.

In the immediate future, there are plans to place a 40-inch Buddha statue in an open space beside the upper building. Having been up there to Passadhi, I see that the space commands a breath-taking vista of George Town and the cape below; the view extending all the way south to include the Penang Bridge and across the Channel to Province Wellesley.

There are other challenges ahead, especially in raising funds for the rehabilitation of the rest of the dilapidated property and in welcoming enough monks to stay here. But there is also the challenge of attracting visitors and devotees to Passadhi because apart from hiking up Penang Hill for the very fit, the only practical access to the place is by the train service and the fares are not cheap in the long run. Moreover, there are usually long queues of tourists for the trains during weekends and the holidays, which may turn away genuine visitors to Passadhi. These are challenges indeed but both Ian and Bin are pragmatic about them: "We'll overcome them with determination and optimism." That's the spirit.