Penang Town Hall
Colonial ballroom and assembly hall lit by coconut-oil lamps for its grand nineteenth-century opening ball.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide covers the Penang Town Hall's lamp-lit opening ball in August 1880, thrown by the colony's rulers and remembered locally as Ang Mor Kong Kuan, the European Club, a name that reflected who was welcome inside. The ballroom hosted balls, concerts and a touring Filipino band for decades, before a Hollywood crew later restaged a very different kind of exclusion there for the 1999 film Anna and the King.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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