Alarm bells rang out among heritage circles earlier this week when word spread that the tomb of a philanthropist tycoon from the 1800s, Koh Seang Tatt, had been broken into at the Batu Lanchang Hokkien cemetery in Penang.

The bones of both Koh and his wife had been removed.

This led to fresh worries about the fate of a nearby tomb belonging to Koh’s great-grandfather, Koh Lay Huan, who was the earliest Chinese kapitan of Penang. Lay Huan, who died in 1826, is buried with his wife in a regal tomb on a hillock in the same sprawling cemetery.

It later emerged that the Kohs’ descendants in Penang had supervised the relocation of several ancestral graveyards on the private land, reasoning that the tombs were being vandalised by squatters. A large 6.1ha memorial park is now planned around the tomb of Lay Huan.

Some quarters have, however, questioned if the relocations were also due to a low-density residential development project planned on a portion of the cemetery.

While this chain of events sounds intriguing, what is perhaps even more remarkable and thought-provoking is that few people were even aware and remotely knew about such an important pioneer family before the news about the tombs blew up.

For, fascinatingly enough, Kapitan Koh Lay Huan was one of the most prominent personalities to help propel Penang’s emergence from a forested backwater to a bustling port settlement in the early years under the British colonial administration.

It is recorded that he had in fact helped to bring in the first waves of Chinese and Malay migrants to the island soon after Captain Francis Light’s historic landing in 1786.

One of his sons even became a governor of Kuala Kedah, while another son accompanied Sir Stamford Raffles to Singapore to help set up the first British trading base there when the island was occupied in 1819.

But are these and many other contributions of the Koh family to both Penang and the early heritage of Malaysia at large, even recorded in our history books today?

Uncannily enough, a similar scenario had occurred about six months ago, when on July 26 an old bungalow previously belonging to the family of ... businessman and leader Khaw Sim Bee was illegally demolished by a developer at Pykett Avenue in George Town.

While several quarters came out to decry the loss of the historic building and the manner in which the destruction was undertaken, what it also did was to open up the public’s eyes to the existence of another giant personality from our nation’s past.

Khaw, who was assassinated in 1916, was a significant personage in the trading and political history of the region during the 1800s. He was one of the key figures to promote tin-mining and shipping in Malaya, and was behind the development of roads, railways and rubber plantations in Thailand.

So influential was he that the king of Siam appointed him as the governor of Phuket in the 1890s. A statue bearing his likeness adorns a public area in Phuket, and a road was named after him in Penang, ironically enough near the site of the demolished bungalow.

There are numerous other important landmarks that are not told to our people. For example, publicity is only now being generated of the fact that Chinese revolutionary leader, Sun Yat Sen, had used Penang as a base to plan the great 1911 uprising in China. The buildings he had used for his meetings and his operations during the six months he stayed in Penang still stand.

And even little known is the fact that the grand Nobel literature laureate of India, Rabindranath Tagore, had in 1927 laid the foundation stone for a Chinese education society building called the Hu Yew Seah in George Town. The building in Madras Lane has left intact the original plaque of Tagore’s inauguration.

There are many rich details of our cherished history not being told to the generations today. One can only hope it won’t take any more demolitions before our public and our children are made aware of such hidden jewels in the great legacy of our nation.

** Republished with permission. This article first appeared in the January 13, 2011 issue of theSun. Himanshu is theSun’s Penang bureau chief.