George Town, on the Malaysian island of Penang, and its larger and better-known sibling, Singapore, were both born at a time when the sun famously never set on the British Empire. Located at the northern entrance to the strategically crucial Strait of Malacca, George Town, unlike Singapore, still evokes an age of travel by steamship among storied ports and their grand hotels, an era that began with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.