Letter to the Editor
Penang button The room under the sea


Chung Thye Pin's house  The Chung Thye Pin bungalowDear webmaster/editor
I am the grandson of Chung Thye Phin and I would like to set the record straight.

Queeny Chang (or TjongA Foek) told the truth about my grandfather's Gurney Drive mansion.

If the author would like to dispute the matter please have him/her contact me. Chung Thye Phin's children (my aunts and uncles) are still alive.

Furthermore evidence can be found in "Wong, CS: A gallery of Chinese kapitans. Singapore: Ministry of Culture, 1963" or would the author like to also dispute that well researched body of work?

Please let me know what needs to be done to correct this error.

Jeffery Seow

The Penang File replies:

Chung Thye Pin did not live in that house. He was told it was haunted. The story is known to all, particularly the neighbours along Northam Road. The editor knew some of the children and  enjoyed many happy hours in the pool at their Relau house. But not one of them ever lived in the North Beach house. As a boy, the editor roamed all over the Shanghai Hotel, which then occupied the building, in a vain search for haunted rooms and sad ghosts. He can assure Mr Seow that the dining room  located under the high green dome, and not under the sea.  Mr C S Wong in his article does not mention the Queeny Chang room.  The photograph he  reproduced from the book "British Impressions" clearly shows the northern boundary of the house marked by a row of trees that separated the grounds from the sandy North Beach.

Queeny Chang's memory played her false. If she is right the diners must have more than uncomfortable in the suffocating heat of the chamber in the days before air conditioning came into use. On a legal note, in those days the buildings went right up to the sea wall,  from the E & O to the Boon Pharmarcy family house which marked the beginning of North Beach. Along North Beach, the boundary of land conveyed to private owners  was drawn well back and away from the sand and sea . The Land Office would never have allowed building under the sand across the boundary and under the sea simply because that territory was Crown property.

We are advised by an architect that the British engineers of the day did not have the design skills nor  the materials with which to build a dining room under the sea. For one thing, where could they have obtained the glass top that could stand the weight of the ocean, and what sealants could they have used? It is doubtful if they were capable of preventing damp from invading the tunnel and the dining room. There is also the question of air. Did they have electricity then to pump in air? If the dining room had air vents they would have been seen jutting out of the sea.#

What Queenie Chang wrote:

" Finally Mrs Chung took us downstairs to have tea in the dining room built under the sea.... When I happened to look up at the ceiling I saw that it was not painted as I had at first thought. It was a glass dome through which I could see fishes swimming about!" 
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The Penang File, a non-profit magazine,  is sponsored by the family of Ooi Boon Lay and made possible by the initial  efforts of Tai Keat Eam and Lee Khai

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Thanks to Robyn Choi for her assistance this issue
 
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The Penang File Issue 33