Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion

Restored Peranakan mansion of the "Rockefeller of the East," painted indigo blue

The Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion — known locally as the Blue Mansion for its distinctive indigo walls — is one of the finest surviving examples of Straits Chinese architecture in the world. Built in the 1880s and 1890s on Leith Street, it combines a Chinese courtyard layout with louvred windows, cast-iron railings imported from Glasgow, hand-painted Art Nouveau ceramic tiles from France, and carved granite from China. The house was awarded a UNESCO Asia Pacific Award for Cultural Heritage Conservation in 2000 after a decade of careful restoration.

Guided tours run daily at fixed times and are the only way to access most of the house; the guides are knowledgeable and the tour takes about an hour. Rooms within the mansion are also rented as boutique hotel accommodation. The mansion was used as a filming location for the movie Indochine (1992) and the television series Marco Polo. Morning light hits the indigo facade at its best — arrive early if you want photographs without crowds.

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A story
Cheong Fatt Tze was born a Hakka peasant in Guangdong province in 1840 and arrived in Southeast Asia at sixteen with nothing. By the time he died in 1916, he controlled a trading empire spanning ports across the region, had been appointed consul-general for China in Penang, and had been called the "Rockefeller of the East" by the New York Times. He had eight wives and forty-six recorded children. The Penang mansion — designed by a Chinese architect trained in Hong Kong using both Cantonese and European materials — was one of nine houses he owned.

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