Penang State Museum and Art Gallery
Colonial schoolhouse turned heritage museum, its bombed-out wing never rebuilt after the Second World War.
This guide to the Penang State Museum and Art Gallery traces the building back to 1896, when it opened as the Penang Free School, and follows it through a second wing, a change of tenants to the Hutchings School, and the Allied bombing that flattened one wing during the Second World War. You'll hear how Malaysia's first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, who once sat in these classrooms as a boy, pointed the state toward this very site when it wanted a museum in the early 1960s. Look for Captain Robert Smith's early paintings of colonial Penang inside, among the only visual records of the town before photographs existed.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.