For generations, hand-carved wooden signboards identified Penang’s Chinese homes, shops and temples, carrying family origins, business names and wishes for prosperity. The boards can survive the tropical weather for more than a century; the craft may not. In his small George Town workshop, Kok Ah Wah still cuts every character by hand while plastic signs and digital displays multiply outside.
Before neon, plastic and glowing screens competed for attention, Penang’s shopfronts spoke through wood. Hand-carved signboards hung above houses, businesses and temples, their Chinese characters announcing who lived or worked inside – and doing so with considerably more dignity than a flashing LED arrow.
On family homes, a signboard could identify the district in China from which the residents’ ancestors had come, revealing their dialect group and family name.
Above a shop, it displayed the company’s name and often the nature of its business. A carved board was also a traditional gift for a newly opened enterprise, offered as an auspicious wish for luck and prosperity. It was advertising, identity and blessing combined in one handsome piece of timber.
Made from wood selected to withstand the tropical climate, well-crafted boards could last for generations – some for more than a century. The profession that produced them has proved less weather-resistant. Today, machine-cut lettering, plastic signs and illuminated displays are quicker and cheaper, and they have steadily replaced the work of traditional engravers.
A handmade signboard demands time. The characters must first be carefully arranged and drawn, then cut into the wood with chisels before the board is painted and finished. Mass production has little patience for such ceremony. It can produce a sign in a fraction of the time, although generally without the marks of the hand that made it – or any particular interest in lasting until the next century.
Kok Ah Wah was described as one of Penang’s few remaining traditional signboard engravers, and possibly its last. He inherited the trade from his father, Kok Ying Chow, who left China after the Second World War, settled in Penang and became an engraver. Despite his advancing age, Mr Kok continued to work in a small workshop in the centre of George Town.
I found him bent over a thick wooden board, his wrinkled hands guiding a chisel through the strokes of a Chinese character. Each movement was controlled and unhurried. The workshop offered none of the instant gratification of a digital printer: the letter appeared gradually, shaving by shaving, accompanied by the quiet tap of metal against wood.
Orders from local businesses were far fewer than in the past, so Mr Kok had adapted. Alongside traditional commissions, he made smaller plaques for visitors, engraving their names in Chinese or English. Tourism, it seemed, had given the old craft a new vocabulary – even if some of the names required rather more space than others.
Behind him hung old photographs and framed newspaper articles showing some of his better-known signboards. Years of sunlight had faded the paper, but the carved boards in the images still looked substantial. There was an uncomfortable irony in that contrast: the records of his work were ageing faster than some of the work itself.
Watching Mr Kok carve, I wondered what would happen when he finally put down his chisels. One of his sons occasionally helped with the carving and painting, but it was uncertain whether he would take over the business. As with many endangered crafts, learning the technique is only part of the challenge; there must also be enough customers willing to pay for the time, skill and patience it requires.
Outside the workshop, modern signage was becoming larger, brighter and more insistent. Digital displays changed their messages in seconds; giant billboards demanded attention from half a street away. Mr Kok’s signboards did something quieter. They carried the pressure of his hand, the history of a family and the hope that a name carved carefully into wood might endure.
A plastic sign can identify a shop. A hand-carved signboard can tell us something about the people who opened it, the community around it and the craftsman who shaped every character. In a city famous for preserving its heritage, that distinction deserves to remain visible – not only in museums and old photographs, but above the doors where these signs have always belonged.
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