Chua Cheng Bok
Malaysian businessman
Chua Cheng Bok (Chinese: 蔡正木; pinyin: Cài Zhèngmù) was one of Malaya's most prominent businessmen in the first half of the 20th century, and opened the region's first cinema. He was born in Malacca in 1880 as the second son of an immigrant family from Fujian, China. His father Chua Toh started his life as nutmeg dealer in his young age, and had five sons: Cheng Tuan (the eldest), Cheng Bok, Cheng Hee, Cheng Hock and Cheng Liat. Chua Toh died in 1908 and was buried in Bukit Cina.
Following his older brother Cheng Tuan, Cheng Bok worked for Riley, Hargreaves and Co and Federated Engineering for a few years. They started their first business, Federal Stores, before forming the Cycle and Carriage in Kuala Lumpur on 15 June 1899. In the early 1900s, the Cycle and Carriage business was successful. It opened a branch under the name of C&C Co in Singapore in 1926.
Chua was a philanthropist. Some famous buildings built by him are the oldest cinema in Malaysia, the Coliseum Theater and Café in Jalan Petaling, Kuala Lumpur, the Chua Cheng Bok Building in Ipoh, and Bok House in Jalan Ampang (demolished in 2006).
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This entry incorporates text from “Chua Cheng Bok” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.