The Cenotaph began with a meeting and a fundraising problem. In 1928, G. D. A. Fletcher of the Ex-Services Association proposed a war memorial for Penang's Esplanade, the grassy field facing Fort Cornwallis where the city gathered for public occasions. The initial cost estimate of $7,000 Straits Dollars quickly ballooned to $12,000 as the bronze ornaments from London proved more expensive than expected. The community raised the money through operas, fancy dress balls, and public subscriptions, eventually scraping together $12,513.52 -- barely enough to cover costs after construction. Architect David McLeod Craik designed a tapered granite column 25 feet tall, with bronze plaques bearing the badges of the Navy, Army, Air Force, and Mercantile Marine. Local carver Yeo Kim Eng shaped the Penang granite. Adrian Stokes & Co. in London cast the sword, laurel wreath, and Flanders poppies. The Borneo Co. donated the bricks. Contractors Pin & Co. built it at cost.

The foundation stone went down on 11 November 1928, exactly ten years after the armistice. Penang's Resident Councillor Meadows Frost lowered it by pulley while a wooden model of the finished cenotaph stood behind, giving the crowd a glimpse of what their money would build. A year later, on Armistice Day 1929, Frost returned to unveil the completed memorial. A military parade began at 10:25 a.m., and after the shroud fell, the Last Post sounded across the Esplanade. A rocket fired to mark the start of two minutes' silence; a second rocket ended it with the Reveille. For fifteen minutes, representatives of the public laid wreaths -- among them, in a detail the newspapers faithfully recorded, an Italian in Blackshirt attire who gave the Fascist salute. The ceremony concluded with God Save the King. The empire's contradictions were already gathering on the monument's steps.

In January 1945, Allied bombers struck Penang during the Japanese occupation. The Cenotaph took a direct hit. Rather than let the damaged structure collapse unpredictably, the Japanese dismantled it systematically, saving 184 intact dressed granite blocks and all the bronze decorations for possible future use. It was a strange act of preservation amid destruction -- an occupying force carefully storing the pieces of a monument honoring the army that had once defended the island against them. After the British retook Penang in Operation Jurist, a temporary flagstaff was planted where the Cenotaph had stood. For two Remembrance Days, in 1946 and 1947, veterans gathered around a bare pole on the Esplanade, mourning the dead of two wars at a site that now bore the scars of the second.

The Ex-Services Association petitioned the Malayan Union government to rebuild. The government declined to pay, so the veterans did it themselves. Architect Charles Geoffrey Boutcher donated his design services. Using the surviving granite blocks and original bronze ornaments, workers reconstructed the Cenotaph for $3,500 Malayan Dollars -- a fraction of the original cost, though the result differed slightly from Craik's design because they could only work with the blocks that had survived. Precast concrete replaced granite on the steps to save money. The new Cenotaph faces a different direction than the original, looking out toward Esplanade Road rather than Fort Cornwallis. It was unveiled on Remembrance Sunday 1948, just three years after its destruction. In 2023, the Esplanade promenade was redeveloped as a linear garden, and the iron fences around the memorial were removed, opening the Cenotaph to the public in a way its builders never intended.