The Sarkies Brothers: The Family Behind Asia’s Grand Hotels

The Sarkies brothers helped turn a handful of hotels in Penang, Singapore and Rangoon into names that travelers still recognize. Martin, Tigran, Aviet and Arshak came from an Armenian family in New Julfa, Isfahan, and built a hospitality business across colonial Southeast Asia. Their story begins with two Penang hotels, reaches Raffles in 1887 and becomes more complicated at The Strand. It ends with a financial collapse that outlived the brothers, while several of the hotels survived.

We became interested in the family while exploring heritage hotels, especially Penang’s Eastern & Oriental. Looking at the portraits in its corridors adds a human scale to an otherwise rather grand story. Our hotel reviews follow the places as guests; here, we follow the people behind them.

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Who Were the Sarkies Brothers?

Martin, Tigran, Aviet and Arshak Sarkies were Armenian brothers from New Julfa, the Armenian quarter of Isfahan in what was then Persia. Their routes through British India eventually led to the port cities of Southeast Asia. Martin and Tigran established the first Penang ventures, and the younger brothers later joined the hotel business. Each became associated with a different part of its growing network. Singapore’s National Library Board traces that network from Penang to Singapore and Rangoon.

Their success belonged to a particular age of steamship travel and colonial trade. The earlier Dutch East India Company graphic below evokes a different chapter in that history, centuries before the Sarkies hotels. Its speculative valuation is an illustration from 2017, not a measure of the brothers’ business.

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A Family Name, and a Misidentified Photograph

Older accounts offer different explanations for the family’s surname and Armenian patronymic. Without a reliable genealogy in hand, it would be misleading to present one spelling as settled fact. A more concrete correction concerns the photograph below: it has often been captioned as showing all four brothers. Historian Nadia H. Wright identifies Martin and Arshak alongside hotel manager Jacob Constantine and accountant Martyrose Arathoon. The other two men in the frame are colleagues, not Tigran and Aviet. Wright explains the identification in a National Museum lecture.

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Penang Was the Starting Point

Tigran opened the Eastern Hotel in George Town in 1884. Martin joined him, and the brothers acquired the former Hotel de l’Europe on Farquhar Street, renaming it the Oriental. Aviet also became involved in the Penang operation. These were two establishments before the familiar E&O name emerged, a distinction easily lost when the hotel’s history is compressed into a single founding date.

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How the Eastern Became the E&O

The Oriental opened in 1885. After extending and renovating it, the brothers gave up the earlier Eastern property and carried its established name into the Eastern & Oriental in 1889. The hotel’s own history describes the Eastern in 1884 and the Oriental in 1885. Our fuller history of the Eastern & Oriental Hotel follows the building through its later expansions, closure and restoration.

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From Penang to Raffles Hotel Singapore

Raffles Hotel opened in Singapore on December 1, 1887, with ten rooms in a former boarding house on Beach Road. Martin and Tigran had looked beyond Penang after a substantial rent increase at the Eastern. Tigran became particularly closely associated with Raffles and oversaw its growth, including additions in 1890 and the main building that opened in 1899. Those dates and the original location are documented in the National Library Board’s hotel history.

Martin retired to New Julfa around 1890. Arshak joined the business and became closely identified with the E&O in Penang; Aviet’s work eventually took him to Rangoon. The brothers shared a name and a reputation, though it helps to remember that each hotel’s daily decisions were made by particular people, managers and later family associates. We have written separately about Raffles Hotel’s long history and restoration.

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The Sarkies Connection in Rangoon and Penang Hill

Aviet expanded the family’s interests in Rangoon, now Yangon. The Strand dates its building to 1901 and says the Sarkies brothers acquired it soon afterward; other historical accounts place Aviet’s hotel activity there earlier. The careful description is that The Strand became one of the hotels associated with the family, without reducing its complicated beginnings to a single claim about who first opened it. The Strand’s own account still acknowledges that connection.

The family also operated the Crag Hotel on Penang Hill from the early twentieth century. It was another kind of escape from the port-city hotels below, and its buildings survive in a very different state from the E&O or Raffles. The Sea View Hotel in Singapore joined the business in the 1920s through Martyrose Arathoon, a later partner and an important figure in Raffles’ management. Calling every one of these properties a hotel founded by four brothers would erase the people and transactions that made the network work.

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The Deaths and the 1931 Bankruptcy

Tigran and Martin died in 1912, and Aviet died in 1923. Arshak continued to run the E&O and oversaw a costly rebuilding program in the late 1920s. The brothers’ hotel business was heavily indebted as the Depression reduced travel. Arshak died in Penang on January 9, 1931. Later that year, creditors placed Sarkies Brothers, Hotel Proprietors, into receivership. The liabilities exceeded $3.5 million in the currency of the time, and the case involved 195 creditors. These figures describe the firm’s historical debts, not the present value of any hotel.

The collapse was not a story of one bad hotel: the National Library Board’s account notes that Raffles itself remained profitable, while payments to buy out Aviet’s widow, loans for the Sea View and the E&O, and the cost of rebuilding the Penang hotel strained the firm. The hotels had different futures after the family lost control. Their shared past is still visible in the names and photographs, even if the financial story seldom makes it onto the lobby walls.

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After the Last Brother

Arshak’s death in January 1931 preceded the bankruptcy proceedings, sometimes confused with his date of death. Raffles passed to a new company in 1933, and the E&O had its own subsequent corporate history. Another branch of the family had a separate hotel story in Java: Martin’s son Lucas Martin Sarkies developed the Oranje in Surabaya, later known as Hotel Majapahit. The family’s influence reached beyond the four brothers without making every later venture part of the same company.

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What Remains of the Sarkies Legacy

The Eastern & Oriental, Raffles and The Strand remain recognizable landmarks, though their buildings, ownership and guest experience have changed considerably. The Crag and Sea View followed other paths. For us, the useful part of this history lies in seeing the hotels as an interconnected family undertaking, shaped as much by migration and finance as by architecture. On a stay at the E&O, the portraits invite a second look. They also remind us to read the captions carefully.

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Sarkies Brothers FAQ

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Sources and Further Reading

• National Library Board, Raffles Hotel & the Romance of Travel, for the Raffles chronology and bankruptcy.
• National Library Board, East of Suez: The Mystique of Travel, for the broader Sarkies network and Lucas Martin Sarkies.
• Nadia H. Wright’s National Museum lecture transcript, for the portrait identification and Sea View history.
• Eastern & Oriental Hotel history and The Strand’s account, for the hotels’ own historical summaries.