Born in Ipoh. Built for the World.
Tin, trains and the people who built our hometown.
Real people and places, from Ipoh to China and Kazakhstan.
You are here
Ipoh · Malaysia
Ipoh Stories
Tin, trains and the people who built our hometown.
Read stories
Shanghai · China · 中文
China Stories
Stories from China, written in Mandarin.
Read stories
Astana · Kazakhstan · Русский
Kazakhstan Stories
Stories from Kazakhstan, written in Russian.
Read stories
There was no vacancy for a cartoonist, so they made him a crime reporter. He drew anyway. This is the story of a round-faced boy from a Perak kampung, the Ipoh school years that made him, and the house in Batu Gajah buil…
Read more →
Saira Hayati spent 25 years in British property and money. Then she worked out what her life in Kent really cost, moved to Melaka, Malaysia, and bought a five-bedroom home outright. She still lives there. Here is what Ip…
Read more →
Dato' Lim Si Boon left a Singapore consulting career, steered Bonanza Venture Holdings through 1997, grew Tenby Schools and built 1 Lasam in Ipoh.
Read more →
He designed the buildings Ipoh still poses in front of. When they were finished, he was on the other side of the world, in uniform. This is the story of the man, not the station. And of the stone in front of it.
Read more →
He never raced. He just loved watching the bicycle races near his home on Silibin Road in Ipoh. Then, with Sultan Azlan Shah's blessing, Darshan Singh Gill went door to door and raised RM3.25 million from the rakyat to b…
Read more →
It was built in England in 1938, weighs about 4,500 tonnes and floated on its own pond. Once, the Kinta Valley had over a hundred like it. Today, there is one.
Read more →
A remembered restaurant of the railway quarters: the Goodshed on Jalan St John, Ipoh, and its mamak roti canai and murtabak.
Read more →
Before the trains, a fortune in Kinta tin went to the sea by boat. The river it travelled on does not even pass through Ipoh. So why does Ipoh owe it so much?
Read more →
On 7 January 1907, a school opened in Ipoh with eight pupils. More than a century later, its old girls include an Oscar winner and the Raja Permaisuri of Perak.
Read more →
Why does Malaysia say Deepavali and North India say Diwali? How a row of lamps travelled with Tamil workers to Ipoh, and what each name means.
Read more →
In 1884, when Ipoh was still a jungle village, the Kinta Valley was run from a riverbank town called Batu Gajah. It had the magistrate, the land office and the courthouse. Then it lost the crown. How?
Read more →
The loan sharks wanted a girl of 15 as payment for her father's debts. Her family slipped out the back door. More than a century later, the YLCO Gallery of Families, The Living Archive (formerly the YLCO Museum), sits in…
Read more →
The story of Ban Loong (萬隆號), the Loh family's general merchants and hardware shop at 51 Leech Street (Jalan Bandar Timah), Ipoh, and how fourth-generation engineer Ir Loh Ban Ho turned it into Ban Loong Hotel.
Read more →
He came up the Kinta River in 1892 and started in a tin-mine kitchen. A shipwreck, a fortune teller and a brother's death later, Ipoh named a road after him.
Read more →
Tony Lim Chin Hau, the Kedah-born founder of Boat Noodle and BananaBro, died on 2 November 2026 aged 47. Five lessons from his journey to more than 40 BananaBro outlets.
Read more →
He arrived in 1899 and started out as someone else's clerk. He ended up planning names for great-grandchildren he would never meet. One of them would carry an Oscar home to Ipoh.
Read more →
His family sold Hondas on Kampar Road for half a century. He steered the business through a crash that wiped out most of Malaysia's Honda dealers. Then he found a book his grandfather's brother had written, and built a m…
Read more →
Sir Hugh Low spent nearly thirty years on Labuan, passed over for the top job. In 1877 he became British Resident of Perak, and the first rubber trees in Malaysia grew in his garden at Kuala Kangsar. For almost twenty ye…
Read more →
In 1966, a young debater and actor left St Michael's Institution, the white Gothic-style school on Jalan SP Seenivasagam in Ipoh. than three decades later, in 1998/1999, he came back to run it. This is the story of Louis…
Read more →
In 1898, by the Kinta River, Dato' Panglima Kinta Muhammad Yusuff, the "Lord of Kinta", built a mosque in memory of his wife, Saaidah. It still stands on Jalan Masjid, Ipoh. His Ipoh-born son, Mohamed Eusoff, an Anderson…
Read more →
Shaik Adam started out as a clerk in a Penang tailor's shop. He bet his money on ice in a tin town where, one 1908 account says, ice could not be had. The ice has long melted. What he built with the profits is still stan…
Read more →
Before it belonged to the whole nation, the melody of Negaraku was the royal anthem of Perak. Before that, by most accounts, it was a popular song called Terang Bulan. In 1957, after 514 competition entries and a piece b…
Read more →
You may have queued outside it for breakfast: a corner bungalow in Canning Garden, Ipoh, with steamers of bright blue and orange dumplings. In June 2018 Ceylyn Tay and her husband YC Nang opened Canning Dim Sum there, an…
Read more →
You have probably walked past an Eu Yan Sang shop, and many of us think of it as a Singapore brand. But it was born in Gopeng, near Ipoh, in 1879, when Eu Kong opened a small medicine shop for tin miners and called it "Y…
Read more →
You have probably seen the old portrait of a Kapitan in Qing mandarin robes. We guessed he was one of Perak's tin Kapitans. We were wrong: he is Kapitan Yap Ah Loy of Kuala Lumpur. But Perak had mandarin Kapitans of its …
Read more →
Some people online said Bella Astillah was lucky to marry him. At their wedding reception in front of 3,000 guests, Syed Saddiq said the opposite, and backed it with her life story. Here is what he said, as reported, and…
Read more →
You may have driven down his name this morning. Lau Pak Khuan started at the bottom of a Perak tin mine, pushing a cart of ore, and rose to own about 20 mines, lead Perak's biggest Chinese associations, survive a grenade…
Read more →
A viral post imagined every Mahathir-era landmark renamed after him. In real life, not one of the big ones carries his name. The Twin Towers, KLIA, Putrajaya, Sepang, Proton and the North-South Expressway are all named a…
Read more →
Most Malaysians know Mid Valley Megamall. Very few can name the man who helped put it on the map. Tan Chin Nam (1926–2018) sold vegetables by the roadside in wartime, built a trading company, then a housing estate on abo…
Read more →
Every Malaysian of a certain age has heard it: a bank officer took one sen from every account and became a millionaire. In 1990, Aman Shah Ahmad was jailed over a Hock Hua Bank fraud worth about RM4 million, exposed afte…
Read more →
Ho Kai Cheong founded Ho Yan Hor herbal tea in Ipoh in 1941 with about $4 and a stall at No. 1 Treacher Street. His loudspeaker van made the brand famous. His son took it worldwide. This is the story.
Read more →
Every day, hundreds of thousands of Malaysians say his name without knowing it. They say it when they give their address. When they call a Grab. When they tell someone where they live. When they describe where the good f…
Read more →
One hundred and ten Malaysians. Every community. Every field. Every era.
Read more →
Every day, millions of Malaysians open their wallets, pull out a ringgit note, and hand it across a counter without once looking at the face on it. They should look.
Read more →
While Malaysia slept through the holidays, they were digging. Not just digging. Engineering. Planning. Executing one of the most audacious heists this country has ever seen, with a patience and a precision that the polic…
Read more →
There is a trapdoor in the floor of a courtroom in the Ipoh High Court. Not a metaphor. Not a legend. An actual trapdoor, set into the courtroom floor, that opens to a staircase that descends below ground level.
Read more →
Ipoh's Birch Memorial Clock Tower has stood in Old Town since 1909. It has watched an empire arrive. And it has watched that empire leave. This is the story of the Perak clock that kept time through all of it.
Read more →
Ipoh Railway Station, the ‘Taj Mahal of Ipoh’, is more than a pretty building. Tin made Ipoh’s fortune. But it was the Perak railway, from 1885 onward, that carried that fortune out to the world.
Read more →
Most cities build their temples on the ground. Ipoh built its cave temples inside the hills. This is the story of Sam Poh Tong, Perak Tong and Kek Lok Tong, the Perak temples carved out of faith and limestone.
Read more →
Concubine Lane in Ipoh is barely a hundred metres long. You can walk it in two minutes. Yet this one narrow lane in Perak holds more of Ipoh's soul than any skyscraper could.
Read more →