Architecture
The Chapel at Fort Cornwallis was built in 1799. The first recorded marriage here took place that same year when John Timmers married Martina Rozells, Light's widow. The building in the southwest bastion is almost certainly not the chapel, but the main magazine; the massive roof and the surrounding buttresses are typical of magazine buildings of the period. The building is the earliest roofed structure surviving in Penang from the colonial era.
Old cannons decorate the fort. The largest cannon, known as Seri Rambai Cannon, was cast in 1603, and was a gift from the Dutch to the Sultan of Johore in 1606. In 1613, the Portuguese took possession of Seri Rambai. The cannon was taken to Java, where it stayed until 1795, when it was given to Acheh and brought to Kuala Selangor. The British seized the cannon and placed it in the fort in 1871.
A 21 m (69 ft) skeletal steel lighthouse was erected in the northeast corner of the fort in 1882. It is the second oldest lighthouse in Malaysia, after the Cape Rachado Lighthouse at Tanjung Tuan, Malacca. Originally named Fort Point Lighthouse, it was renamed Penang Harbour Lighthouse after renovation in 1914 and 1925. The State Tourism Development Committee chairman claimed in 2006 that it was the only lighthouse in Malaysia which resembles a ship's mast, and the only one in Peninsular Malaysia not serving any navigational purpose.
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Entrance drawbridge of Fort Cornwallis.
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Seri Rambai Cannon and walls viewed from the Esplanade.
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Interior in February 2011 with its lighthouse in the background.
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“I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.”
—Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923)