Keeper of Penang’s Rattan-Weaving Tradition

Before plastic furniture arrived in Malaysia and made itself thoroughly at home, rattan filled houses, verandas and coffee shops with chairs, tables, baskets and rocking seats built for the tropical climate. On George Town’s Chulia Street, elderly craftsman Lee Soo Kee still opens his rattan shop, repairs old pieces and keeps company with his cat while a once-common trade quietly waits to see whether fashion will return.

By the time I found Lee Soo Kee’s shop on Chulia Street, the working day appeared to have settled into a comfortable arrangement. Mr Lee sits among the rattan furniture, greeting people who pass. His cat keeps him company and seems to have accepted no obvious responsibility for sales, repairs or customer relations. Every traditional business, after all, needs senior management.

The shop is tucked into a row of George Town’s heritage shophouses. Rocking chairs, tables, baskets and smaller woven objects occupy the space, their curved frames and warm natural colour standing apart from the plastic goods found in modern shops. These are not carefully arranged museum exhibits. They are objects made to be sat on, carried, repaired, inherited and, in the case of a good rocking chair, used for doing absolutely nothing with great purpose.

Mr Lee had once made many kinds of rattan furniture. Now in his eighties, he explains that his hands are no longer strong enough to bend and shape the thick lengths required for large chairs and tables. Rattan is admired for its flexibility, but it does not become furniture through polite suggestion. It must be cut, softened, bent, held in position and woven tightly enough to survive years of use.

Although large commissions had become too demanding, Mr Lee still spends his days at the shop. He occasionally makes smaller objects and accepts repairs when customers bring them in. Repairing an old chair may attract less attention than producing a fashionable new one, but it extends the life of both the furniture and the knowledge needed to understand how it was built.

Rattan is not a tree but a climbing palm that grows abundantly in the forests of Southeast Asia. Its long, slender stems are strong, light and flexible, qualities that made it especially useful in a hot and humid region. Unlike heavy furniture that seems to expect a permanent address, rattan can be moved around without requiring three relatives and a discussion about everyone’s back.

For generations, Malaysian craftspeople transformed it into household furniture and baskets. The material was practical, but the weaving also allowed room for considerable skill. A finished object depends on the maker’s ability to judge tension, curves and spacing. If the weave is too loose, the chair will announce the mistake as soon as somebody sits down – possibly with more drama than the customer had planned.

Before synthetic materials took over the market, rattan was an ordinary presence in Malaysian homes.

That very familiarity may partly explain why the craft received so little ceremony. People rarely declare a household chair to be cultural heritage while they are still sitting on it. Only when the workshops begin disappearing does an everyday object acquire the solemn title of “tradition”.

Plastic furniture offered powerful competition. It was cheap, easy to clean, quick to produce and available in colours that nature had never requested. Wrought iron and faux wood added further choices, while handmade rattan required time, experienced labour and customers prepared to pay for both. One by one, Penang’s traditional rattan shops began to close.

Mr Lee’s workshop represents more than one elderly man’s business. It belongs to a network of small urban trades that once shaped daily life in George Town: signboard engravers, shoemakers, tailors, metalworkers and furniture makers. Their shops were places where objects could be ordered to fit a particular person or home, then returned years later for repair. The relationship lasted longer than many contemporary warranties.

There is something quietly stubborn about Mr Lee continuing to open the shop even after his hands had limited the work he could undertake. He can no longer wrestle rattan into large armchairs, but he remains surrounded by the evidence of what those hands had made. Customers still know where to find him, passers-by still stop, and the cat still reports for duty – using the broadest possible definition of duty.

The decline of traditional rattan work is not necessarily the end of the material itself. Young furniture designers have begun returning to rattan, drawn to its natural appearance, lightness, and ability to form graceful curves. What was dismissed as old-fashioned can reappear as contemporary design, usually after waiting long enough for everyone to forget why they stopped liking it.

A revival, however, needs more than rattan appearing in fashionable catalogues. It also needs the practical knowledge of selecting, bending, joining and weaving the material. Designs may be sketched on a computer, but rattan still has to be persuaded by hand – and it has opinions about the process.

As I left the shop, the rocking chairs and baskets seemed less like remnants of a vanished past than patient objects awaiting another turn. Fashion has already replaced rattan once; it may yet bring it back. Mr Lee and his cat, meanwhile, appeared in no great hurry. After a lifetime spent bending stubborn materials into useful shapes, waiting for fashion to come full circle was probably the easier part.