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Cover: Masjid India Muslim, Ipoh, 2015 (photo: Miss Prema Darshini, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons); the mosque's doorway, 2016 (photo: Hudaradz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons); the Kinta Ice Works, Ipoh, photograph printed in Twentieth Century Impressions of British Malaya (1908), p. 908, public domain, Cornell University Library scan via Internet Archive. Background: Club at Ipoh, c. 1910 (photo: C.J. Kleingrothe, public domain, Leiden University Library, KITLV collection 79986, via Wikimedia Commons), darkened.
Shaik Adam started out as a clerk in a Penang tailor's shop. He bet his money on ice in a tin town where, one 1908 account says, ice could not be had.
The ice has long melted. What he built with the profits is still standing. Here is how.
You have driven past the white and green mosque beside St Michael's Institution, its scalloped arches facing the Ipoh Padang, more times than you can remember, usually on your way to somewhere else.
And on a hot Ipoh afternoon, you have never once wondered where the ice in your drink came from.
The two are connected.
Who founded Masjid India Muslim in Ipoh? Masjid India Muslim (the Indian Muslim Mosque, also called the Town Padang Mosque) on Jalan S.P. Seenivasagam, Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia, opened in April 1908. It was largely paid for by M. Shaik Adam, a Tamil Muslim businessman from India who became the proprietor of the Kinta Aerated Water Factory and founded the Kinta Ice Works in Ipoh.
In short: the man who made ice for early Ipoh paid for the mosque on the Padang.
Here is the strange part. A book written in 1908, while the mosque was still being built, said it would cost 500,000 dollars. A report from the opening, as later researchers cite it, put the whole thing, land and building, at about 25,000 dollars.
So how did a tailor's clerk become, in the words of that 1908 book, "one of the pioneers of Ipoh"? And which of those two numbers is true?
Hold on to both questions. We will come back to them.
THE MOSQUE YOU NEVER STOPPED AT
Masjid India Muslim stands on Jalan S.P. Seenivasagam, once called Clayton Road, opposite the Ipoh Padang. According to Ipoh heritage researchers, it was there before its neighbour, St Michael's Institution.
It was built by workmen from India in the Mughal style, square in plan, with scalloped arches that are often compared to the Diwan-i-Khas in Delhi's Red Fort. It was built for Ipoh's Indian Muslims of the Hanafi school, who, according to a report from the opening, had no mosque of their own. Today it is also known for its free bubur lambuk during Ramadan.
It is not Ipoh's oldest mosque. Masjid Panglima Kinta, by the Kinta River, dates from 1898. What makes this one different is where the money came from: ice and soda water.
To understand how, we have to go to Penang.
A CLERK IN A PENANG TAILOR'S SHOP
Shaik Adam came to Malaya from India. According to Ipoh heritage researchers, he started out in Penang as a clerk in the tailor's shop of a man named A. Moungyee, who also owned a soda water company.
He came to Perak in the late 1880s. By 1908, a book about British Malaya said he had "been working hard in this territory for the last twenty years".
Moungyee opened a second soda water factory in Ipoh in 1899. In 1906, by one account, his former clerk bought it and renamed it the Kinta Aerated Water Company. By 1908 Shaik Adam was the proprietor of the Kinta Aerated Water Factory, with works at Taiping, Kampar and Ipoh.
Soda water sounds like a small business. In the Kinta Valley, it wasn't.
WHY A TIN TOWN NEEDED SODA WATER
Ipoh was growing fast on tin.
Kinta Valley historians Khoo Salma Nasution and Abdur-Razzaq Lubis write that aerated water mattered in mining areas because safe drinking water was so scarce. In Perak, they note, the trade was controlled by two Indian Muslim companies: Syed Burhan's factory in Taiping, started in 1887, and Shaik Adam's.
This series has told you about the men who dug the tin, like Dato' Seri Lau Pak Khuan, who started out pushing a cart of ore. Shaik Adam's fortune came from what the tin towns drank.
Then he saw something else the town did not have.
THE TOWN THAT COULD NOT BUY ICE
Around 1906, Shaik Adam opened the Kinta Ice Works in Ipoh.
The 1908 book called it "an undoubted boon to the people of Ipoh, and, indeed, of Perak". Until it opened, the book says, ice and mineral waters were "unobtainable in the neighbourhood". Ipoh heritage researchers say the ice that did reach the town had to be brought in, and was expensive.
The machinery, according to a 1908 account, was "supplied by Messrs. Henry Vogt & Co., of New York, U.S.A.", probably the Henry Vogt Machine Company of Louisville, Kentucky. A smaller plant at Teluk Anson served the fish trade: fish brought about 125 miles from the river mouth were kept on ice, the book says, for the supply of the whole of Perak.
On the very same page of that 1908 book, among the directors of the Ipoh Foundry, is a name you have met in this series: Eu Tong Sen, the Ipoh-schooled "King of Tin". Ipoh in 1908 was a small town of very big names.
But the ice works was not an overnight success story. It was a gamble.
MONEY THAT DID NOT COME BACK QUICKLY
The 1908 book says plainly that Shaik Adam "risked a great deal of his money in concerns which at the outset did not promise any very rapid returns".
The first machines could make five tons a day, and it was not enough. The plant had to be more than doubled, to twelve tons a day, and even then, the book says, "the supply of ice is still below requirements".
Imagine it: your savings sunk into machinery shipped from America, and a town asking for more ice than you can make.
Then the tension broke. "Out of revenue," the book reports, "the cost of installing the machinery was cleared off within six months after the opening." The concerns that once promised no quick returns "have since become very lucrative".
He added a bakery on Panglima Street, heritage researchers say, and the businesses were joined as the Kinta Ice, Aerated Water and Bakery Company. He became, in the book's words, "a big landowner and house-owner in Perak".
And then he did something with the money that no balance sheet required.
A GIFT ON THE PADANG
The 1908 book says he was building the mosque "as a mark of his gratitude towards his fellow-religionists", and predicted that it would be "one of the most picturesque buildings in Ipoh".
In April 1908, the new mosque was opened for worship. A newspaper of the time described it as "presented to the Mahomedan community of Ipoh by Mr. M. Shaik Adam, of that town".
A clerk from a Penang tailor's shop now had his name on one of the landmarks of the Padang.
THE RIVAL FROM SINGAPORE, AND THE LAST CHAPTER
Success brought competition. Around 1909 or 1910, according to Kinta Valley historians, the big Singapore firm Fraser & Neave opened an aerated water branch in Ipoh, and both of Perak's Indian Muslim soda makers faced serious competition.
Time, too, was short. Shaik Adam died in Taiping in 1912, according to a report from that year, only four years after his mosque opened.
The story did not end with him. His son, Jan Sahib, born in 1885, came from Madras to join the business. Ipoh heritage researchers say he became chief trustee of the mosque his father had founded. He sat on the Kinta Sanitary Board from 1924 and was made a Justice of the Peace in 1935.
Ipoh named a street after the father. Jalan Sheikh Adam runs beside the Birch Memorial Clock Tower, and according to Ipoh City Council records cited by Perak heritage researchers, it was where Malaya's first parking meter was installed, in 1961.
SO, WHAT DID THE MOSQUE REALLY COST?
Remember the two numbers: 500,000 dollars, or about 25,000?
The 500,000-dollar figure comes from the 1908 book, written while the mosque was still going up. It says the cost "will be" 500,000 dollars: a forecast, and it has been repeated ever since.
The smaller figure comes from a report written at the opening in April 1908, as researchers cite it: about 25,000 dollars for the land and the building, of which 20,000 dollars came from Shaik Adam, with the rest from the government and other donors.
We cannot settle it for certain. But the account written when the doors opened is the one closest to the day.
And the answer to our first question? The clerk became a pioneer the same way his ice works paid for itself: he put his money into things that "did not promise any very rapid returns", and kept building while demand ran ahead of supply until it paid. Then he gave some of it back to his town, in a building everyone can still see.
THE MILLIONAIRE LESSON
As the founder of Ipoh – The City of Millionaires, here is what I want every student, parent and young entrepreneur to take from Shaik Adam.
Look for what your town cannot get, and learn to make it there. Ice in a hot tin town was not glamorous. It was needed.
Sell what your town is thirsty for. Then build something your town will keep.
Have you ever tasted the bubur lambuk at Masjid India Muslim, or parked on Jalan Sheikh Adam? Tell us
His ice melted long ago. His mosque is still on the Padang. Ipoh shaped their story. Whose story will Ipoh shape next?
This story carries our Ipoh Connections label, for people who were not born in Ipoh but whose life or work has a real tie to the city. It is part of Ipoh Stories, our City of Millionaires heritage series. At EdQuest International School in Ipoh, we believe history, character and critical thinking are best learned through real stories, including the stories of our own city.
Stories in this series are shared for informational and educational purposes. Where accounts differ, we say so. We respect all races, religions and cultures, and we do not represent or endorse any political party or movement.
