Chinese school in Penang pays tribute to Indian poet

Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore helped lay the foundation stone for SJK(C) Hu Yew Seah in 1927.

Ex-students give the thumbs up to the murals of Rabrindranath Tagore and Dr Wu Lien Teh, painted on the main building of SJK(C) Hu Yew Seah. (Facebook pic).

GEORGE TOWN: What is a huge portrait of an Indian man doing on the wall of a Chinese vernacular school?

While SJK(C) Hu Yew Seah may look like any other Chinese school in the country, not many know that it has a rich history linked to late Indian poet-philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore.

In 1927, Tagore, the first non-European Nobel prize winner in Literature, helped to lay the foundation stone for the school.

Among the school’s old boys are Bayan Baru MP Sim Tze Tzin.

But Sim had only now discovered his alma mater’s connection to Tagore.

“The school has painted Tagore’s face, together with Dr Wu Lien Teh, a Penang-born doctor who was the first Malayan to be nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1935, on the main building of the school, to inspire the students to follow in their footsteps.

“I am equally inspired!” Sim said in his Facebook post.

Tagore played a key role in transforming Bengali literature and musical composition, while Wu was the first Malayan of Chinese descent to study medicine at Cambridge University.

The medical doctor, who died in 1960 at the age of 81, was also successful in stopping the pneumonic plague which resulted in the deaths of 60,000 people in Harbin, China. -FMT