Located atop a small hill in the scenic Perak countryside, Kellie’s Castle is an unfinished mansion originally intended to be the new home for the growing family of a wealthy Scottish rubber plantation owner, William Kellie-Smith.
The Kellie-Smith family originally resided at the smaller Kellas House, which now lies in ruin behind the castle, destroyed during World War II. In 1915, ahead of the birth of his son, Kellie-Smith commissioned a larger mansion to be built.
Bricks, marble and 70 skilled craftsmen were brought in from Chennai, India to fulfill the highly unusual design, which incorporated Moorish, Indo-Saracenic, and Romanesque features. The interior was designed with 14 rooms across 6 floors, secret passageways, and a lift shaft, for what would have been Malaysia’s first elevator.
Progress was severely hampered when the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918 killed many of the workers. Furthermore, Kellie-Smith’s fortunes began to dwindle, as poor investments cost him financially and his health began to suffer.
In 1926, while in Lisbon to finally arrange for delivery of the mansion’s elevator, he contracted pneumonia and passed away. His wife Agnes decided to move the family back to Scotland, selling the castle, estate and plantations to a British company that had no interest in completing the mansion, abandoning Kellie’s Castle to the encroaching jungle.
In addition to its tragic beginnings, the castle and its grounds were rumoured to have been used as a torture and execution site by the Imperial Japanese army during World War II. It was also during WWII that Anthony, the son for whose impending birth the mansion had been built, was killed, further adding to the jinxed image of the mansion.
Many years later, Kellie’s Castle was turned into a tourist attraction and came to prominence in 1999, as one of the settings for the Oscar-nominated film ‘Anna and the King’, starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-fat.
The ruin of Kellas House in its shadows, as well as the many narrow staircases, passageways and dark corners give the mansion an eerie, but bewitching aura. While it is unfinished, it is difficult not to be impressed by the ambitious architecture, and to wonder just how grand a completed Kellie’s Castle could have been.
