Penang Hill

This guide to Penang Hill traces two attempts to conquer the same slope above George Town. It starts in 1897, when three British residents formed a company to haul a steam engine up the hill, and follows why that first line, opened in 1905, was abandoned within a few years. Along the way it stops at Francis Light's hilltop retreat, Bel Retiro, and explains why the hill is still called Bukit Bendera, Flag Hill, in Malay. It then picks up in 1909, when an engineer named Arnold Johnson studied a Hong Kong tramway and set his crew blasting a tunnel straight through the rock.