The tale begins in a small town named Dallas on the Moray Firth in north-east Scotland, where William Smith was born on March 1st 1870. Both his parents were farmers, and owners of a tract of land named Easter Kellas. His mother’s maiden name was Kellie, which he later incorporated into his own.
Exactly when – and why – William Kellie Smith came to Southeast Asia are just two of the unsolved mysteries surrounding his life. His arrival In the Federated Malay States is likely to have been around 1890, a time when many young men were relocating to seek their fortune in the booming rubber economies. His first recorded enterprise was a business venture with a man named Alma Baker, a rubber planter who had been awarded government contracts to build roads in south Perak.
With his share of the profits from this partnership, Kellie invested in the tin mining industry, and also cleared and planted 900 acres of forest land south of Ipoh, an area he named Kinta Kellas after his hometown in Scotland and the name of the local river basin. He then formed a London-based company, issued shares, and gained huge profits from the dividends. Very soon, as owner of both the Kinta Kellas Estate and Kinta Kellas Tin Dredging Company, William Kellie Smith had become a multi-millionaire.
His fortune made, Kellie returned home to marry his childhood sweetheart, Agnes, who accompanied him on his return to Asia in 1903. A year later, their first child, Helen, was born. By the end of the decade, Kellie had completed the construction of his first family home at Kinta Kellas. Although now a crumbling ruin, this once-elegant house was one of the most prestigious in the state, its dazzling Moorish-styled architecture surrounded by fruit orchards, lawns, and flower beds, a symbol of prosperity tended to by a staff of more than 40 people.
Why Kellie decided to build a second house is another mystery, although it may have been prompted by the long-awaited birth of his first son, Anthony, in 1915. This huge new mansion, which he planned to call Kellas House but which later came to be known as Kellie’s Castle, was erected over a period of ten years.
Kellie had long been fascinated with Indian culture and used Tamil-speaking laborers and imported bricks and tiles from India to create the distinctive Madras-style architecture that can still be seen today. His grandiose plans included fourteen rooms, a lift, an underground passage, even, apparently, a tennis court on the second floor. It was to be the hub of colonial society, a place of extravagant style and luxury that would attract people from miles around.
Kellie’s grand dream, however, was thwarted by a series of tragedies. The first was a mysterious illness, most likely a strain of the Spanish flu virus that was ravaging the world in the years following World War I. The disease killed many of his plantation workers and decimated the laborers working on the castle wing. To appease the Gods – and to encourage his Indian workers to stay on – Kellie halted work on the house and began construction of a Hindu temple near to the entrance of the estate, connected to the castle wing by an underground passage. The temple can still be seen today: look up and you can even make out an image of Kellie himself, a figure in a white suit and pith helmet standing among the deities on the rooftop.
Building restarted on the house, but the castle wing was still incomplete when Kellie left for Europe in 1925. He died the following year, leaving his dream house unfinished. The tower never received its lift, the tennis court was never built, and many of the house’s secrets died with him. Over the years, various hidden parts of the house were uncovered, although other enigmas are still unsolved. One mystery in particular, according to the notice board I was reading, remained particularly elusive: the purpose of three tunnels originating from the house. This was an intriguing puzzle – if only one tunnel led to the Hindu temple, then where did the others go …?—Heritage Asia Magazine