Ch'ng Huck Theng

Without the history, the culture and the heritage, then it will be a state without a soul.

The family war #

Then his family tore itself apart over a 143-year-old pastry business.

The crisis that forced Chng Huck Theng into Ghee Hiang in 1999 wasn’t a market disruption or competitive threat—it was generational warfare between the four families that had owned the business since 1926. His own account captures both the internal dynamics and the depth of his initial resistance: “My great-great-grandfather and a good friend of his, Ooi’s grandfather and Yeoh jointly bought the company. This changed things for the four families as Ghee Hiang was supposed to be a typical multi-generational business. We were not supposed to come in.”

The specific cause was unremarkable in retrospect. “It was between my grandfather and father. It mainly started with disagreements on strategy and one thing led to another. They were just at odds with each other.” An extraordinary general meeting resulted in the forced removal of directors—granduncles and uncles from the other families. They sued. The litigation consumed approximately seven years.

His partner Datuk Ooi Sian Hian—an architect by profession who also never planned for a confectionery career—offered the starkest summary: “We did not face many problems during economic downturns. Our biggest setback came in the form of trouble between the families… it was one of toughest challenges the family business had to deal with as the feud nearly spelt its doom.”

The accident of their partnership deserves examination. Ooi was a registered architect—trained to read space, proportion, and form following function. Ch’ng was an artist and media entrepreneur—trained to read audiences, to understand what communicates and what doesn’t. Neither had any background in food manufacturing. This turned out to be the point. The previous generation’s mechanization failure had been an insider decision: people who understood the business in its traditional form assumed that scaling up meant adding machinery. It took two outsiders to see that the brand’s value was not in production efficiency but in sensory experience—and that machines could never replicate what hands had built for a century.

Seven years of enforced clarity #

The seven years between 1999 and 2006 required Huck Theng to hold two identities simultaneously. CHT Network continued operating — magazines require editorial deadlines, advertiser relationships, production schedules that do not pause for family litigation. Court proceedings for Ghee Hiang demanded his presence in parallel: hearings, legal filings, the slow machinery of Malaysian commercial dispute resolution consuming months at a time. His art practice deepened rather than stalled—the one domain he fully controlled, the one arena where no family claim determined the outcome. He could not make unilateral decisions about Ghee Hiang’s operations during this period; the contested ownership structure left him present without authority. What that enforced half-engagement produced, paradoxically, was the clearest possible view of what had gone wrong. The machinery investment. The deteriorating customer service. The abandonment of handmade production methods. He watched the damage accumulate from a position where he could diagnose but not yet intervene—which produces a different quality of attention than the attention of someone who believes they can fix it at any moment. The identity tension was not performative. He had genuinely structured a career outside the family orbit. When the courts pulled him back in, the question was not whether to honour the obligation but how to do so without erasing the person he had become.

What he inherited at settlement in 2006 was a damaged business. The previous management had invested in heavy machinery to cope with rising demand. The result missed the point entirely. Ghee Hiang’s reputation had been built on tau sar pneah hot from the oven—customers would queue for mung bean pastries barely cooled, eating them warm off the paper. The machinery broke that sensory promise. Pastries arrived harder, different, wrong. Customer service had deteriorated in parallel: some customers left empty-handed after being chided for not ordering early enough. The court ordered a mutual buyout. The Ch’ng and Ooi families acquired the Yeap and Yeoh stakes, simplifying ownership to two families. They committed to fixing what the previous generation had broken.

Rebuilding by hand #

The turnaround required forensic specificity. Machinery was retired. Production schedules were rebuilt around handmade methods. Customer service culture was rebuilt from scratch—the operation that had once chided customers for failing to order early enough was trained to invite them instead. Huck Theng recognised that his outsider perspective wasn’t a liability—it was precisely what the business needed. The same international education that had seemed irrelevant to selling tau sar pneah provided distance from the family assumptions that created the crisis. The artistic sensibility that appeared incompatible with commercial operations enabled him to see the brand as cultural patrimony requiring stewardship, not merely a revenue asset requiring management.

Ooi framed the commercial discipline without ambiguity: “I don’t want to be a supermarket, I don’t want to be selling anything and everything like a sundry shop. We are a traditional biscuit maker, that’s our core strength so we will stick to it.” Huck Theng articulated the complementary principle: “Some things have to evolve and some things have to stay. While we have to evolve to survive, we also need to preserve and promote what we are known for. We must not change totally everything; there must be something that our forefathers had done right that gave us an opportunity to grow further.”

Most critically, Huck Theng identified Ghee Hiang Baby Brand Pure Sesame Oil—introduced in the early 1900s and produced at the Jelutong factory since the 1960s—as an undervalued asset requiring serious investment. It had always been there. It needed someone who could see past the pastries that defined the brand’s visible identity.

The best sesame oil in the world #

Sometime between 2008 and 2010, a Hong Kong television chef named So Sze Wong visited George Town as a tourist. She walked into Ghee Hiang, bought sesame oil, and left. No deal was struck, no marketing arranged. Back in Hong Kong, on her TVB cooking show So Good (蘇GOOD), she held up the bottle and told her audience it was “the best sesame oil in the world”—something she treasured only for special dishes. The call volume from Hong Kong that followed was unmanageable at first. Ghee Hiang eventually built distribution across 400+ Hong Kong supermarkets and shopping outlets, including PARKnSHOP’s 300+ stores. The company that maintained century-old Fujian extraction methods had attracted validation that no marketing budget could have purchased.

The market Ghee Hiang operates in is more crowded than its heritage positioning suggests. Approximately 40 tau sar pneah makers compete in Malaysia. Him Heang—founded in 1948 by a former Ghee Hiang baker who left to build his own operation—commands fierce local loyalty through a single outlet and deliberately constrained supply. Ban Heang, established in 1997, built mass-market reach across eight-plus outlets including Penang airport. Ghee Hiang’s response—premium positioning, heritage differentiation, sesame oil as primary revenue—was not the obvious play in 2006. The people who had spent decades in the business had not arrived at it. Two outsiders did.

Sesame oil now generates 70% of Ghee Hiang’s revenue. When George Town’s international tourist traffic dropped 99.9% in the second quarter of 2020, the pastry business—dependent on visitors who no longer arrived—was exposed. The sesame oil operation, insulated by its export structure, provided the revenue floor. Huck Theng used his ATAP chairmanship to advocate for tourism’s reopening, publicly calling for travel bubble expansion to Penang by September 2021. Penang tourism reached 8.24 million visitors in 2024, exceeding pre-pandemic levels.

A state without a soul #

His concurrent roles extend the heritage stewardship philosophy beyond commercial operations. A federal appointment to the Board of Trustees of the National Visual Art Gallery Malaysia (2009–2011) had already recognised his cultural contributions at the national level. He founded Beyond Contemporary Art Penang (BCAP) and serves as Chairman of Dreamz Foundation—organisations that position his work at the intersection of cultural economy and civic life. Under his ATAP chairmanship, George Town’s tourism attractions began presenting themselves as a coherent cultural ecosystem. The practical consequence for Ghee Hiang: its 168-year history stopped being simply a company asset and became part of the city’s pitch to international visitors. As he frames it: “If the government does not take the initiative to do something with the heritage, the culture, and the arts scene, no one is going to bother… We feel that it is also part of our responsibility to make Penang a better place by preserving the culture, preserving the heritage and engaging with the new generation because they will be the next custodian.”

The Beach Street location—which survived Japanese bombing during World War II—has been restored to late 19th/early 20th century aesthetic with viewing decks and museum elements. The George Town World Heritage Incorporated awarded Ghee Hiang its Cultural Continuity Recognition Platinum Status in 2020, marking more than a century of continuous operation at the same site. In January 2023, Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow officially unveiled the renovated heritage boutique. The artist-entrepreneur who never wanted to run a confectionery had transformed family obligation into civic mission.

As Ghee Hiang approaches its 170th year, the expansion momentum reflects the durability of what Huck Theng built after the litigation settled: a new factory at Penang Science Park North began production in 2024, providing capacity for the sesame oil demand that a celebrity chef’s unscripted television endorsement first unlocked fifteen years ago; halal product development—including Tau Sar Pneah Kurma, the first dates-filled variant in the brand’s history—broadens addressable markets; a research collaboration with Hong Kong Baptist University investigates neuroprotective properties of sesame oil bioactive compounds. The obligation he initially resisted became the work that integrated his disparate identities—artist, entrepreneur, heritage steward—into coherent purpose.

“Without the history, the culture and the heritage,” Huck Theng observes, “then it will be a state without a soul. You can build a nice and big building with good infrastructure, but you just have a nice body; you don’t have a soul.”

The reluctant heir discovered that preserving souls is what he was built for all along.

Last updated: April 30, 2026