I have always felt it was the role of education to enable a person to distinguish between the imaginative and the fanciful – releasing the former to enhance our lives and informing the latter with the real food of facts. So I was particularly thrilled when an educational and cultural organisation, which has long been known in Europe and Australasia, has set up a lecture programme in Penang. PENDFAS (Penang Decorative and Fine Arts Society) is now here – the first group in Asia. We kicked off with two amazing lectures by Lars Tharp, a ceramics expert, writer, and lecturer.

The first was entitled “The Gate of Heroes – on the China Trail.” He traced the epic 800-mile overland journey made by Chinese porcelain destined for the great houses of Europe. Each year in the 1600s and 1700s millions of pieces – dinner services, vases, and ornamental wares – were carried from the fabled city of Jingdezhen (the Porcelain Capital of the World) over the mountain border into Guangdong province, passing through the “Gate of Heroes”.

Much of the journey was achieved by human porterage – on the backs of Chinese coolis. Their onward journey from Canton aboard East Indiamen vessels, almost certainly took them through the Straits of Malacca and past Penang itself, where they would very likely have stopped for water.

The second lecture, on the great English painter, William Hogarth, was, I thought, of more limited appeal to an Asian audience. But I was wrong, as the dinner lecture in the colonial environs of the Penang Club could not have been more glittering.

Tharp managed to get us to see the universality of Hogarth’s characters: the dissolute rake, the impoverished aristocrat making a marriage of convenience with a wealthy girl, the harlot turning tricks for money.

In short, Hogarth laid bare the venality at the heart of many human relationships. You really would have needed an excellent pair of Malaysian rubber gloves to have handled some of these characters! It wasn’t just London in the first part of the eighteenth century, it’s everywhere, as is its opposite – decency, charity, and truth.

I really enjoyed going back to the classroom and am avidly waiting 2017 when we hope to have six more lecture pairs on similarly enlivening topics.

For more information on the Penang Decorative & Fine Art Society, see their website: penangdfas.nadfas.net.

This article was originally published in The Expat magazine (January 2017) which is available online or in print via a free subscription.