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Cover: Harry Seggu with Ignatius Chew at the YLCO Museum, Ipoh (photo: Harry Seggu); Soichiro Honda with Chew Choon Kok, c. 1973, and Chew Boon Juan, founder of Ban Hoe Seng (Chew family collection, via the Ban Hoe Seng family blog); background: Alma Baker's tin mining works, from Twentieth Century Impressions of British Malaya (1908), darkened.
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 museum. This is where YLCO Families begins.
If you grew up in Ipoh, you may remember the Honda showroom on Kampar Road, now Jalan Raja Permaisuri Bainun. You may even have passed a road sign reading Jalan Chew Boon Juan, named after a tin miner, without once wondering who he was.
Behind that showroom stood the family mansion where one man grew up. Few of us knew what he would one day fill it with.
Today, his collection fills the fourth floor of 1 Lasam, in Greentown, Ipoh. And on one long panel, four surnames sit side by side: YEOH, LIM, CHEW, OH (杨林周胡).
The museum's panels tell one story about those four names. It begins with a debt in China. It ends with an Oscar.
How do you get from one to the other? That is the question this ten-part series will answer, one family at a time. Hold on to it.
But first, a smaller question: how does a Honda dealer from Ipoh end up as the keeper of four families' memories?
WHO IS IGNATIUS CHEW?
Ignatius Chew Eng Lin is an Ipoh businessman and family historian. He is a grandson of the tin miner Chew Boon Juan, and the former managing director of Ban Hoe Seng, the Honda dealer in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia.
In November 2012, he opened the Chew Museum in a family mansion behind the Ban Hoe Seng showroom on Jalan Kampar. Ten years later, it moved to the 1 Lasam building in Greentown, Ipoh, and became the YLCO (Yeoh Lim Chew & Oh) Museum. He is its founder and curator.
THE GRANDFATHER WHO STARTED IN THE KITCHEN
His grandfather's story starts small. The museum's panels give Chew Boon Juan's dates as 1875 to 1951, and say he arrived in Malaya in 1892, at a tin mine where "he started as assistant to cook".
How he got from there to a road with his name on it is a story of shipwreck, a fortune teller and four brothers. We will tell it in Part 3.
For now, two addresses. In 1908, the panels say, Chew Boon Juan and his elder brother founded Ban Hoe Seng (萬豐成), a rice wholesaler on Market Street, Ipoh. (The family's blog gives the year as 1910.) And in 1905, by the panels' account, Chew Boon Juan had bought a row of shoplots from his uncle's son: 62 and 64 Belfield Street, Ipoh, now Jalan Sultan Yusuf, the address where, by the family's account, Ban Hoe Seng later moved.
FROM RICE TO MOTORCYCLES TO HONDA CARS
After the Second World War, Ban Hoe Seng changed course. Run by two of Chew Boon Juan's sons, Chew Choon Siew as chairman and Chew Choon Kok, Ignatius's father, as managing director, it began selling European motorcycles.
Then, in 1958, by the family's account, a young relative in the company, Yeoh Oon Kok, spotted a salesman riding a small Japanese bike: a 50cc Honda Cub. "This one sure can sell," he said.
The family approached the Penang distributor, Loh Boon Siew, who made Ban Hoe Seng his main Honda dealer for Perak. Honda cars followed in 1967. In 1969, Ban Hoe Seng opened a bigger showroom on Kampar Road.
THE DAY MR HONDA CAME
By the family's account, Honda's founder, Soichiro Honda, visited Malaysia in 1973, the year Ban Hoe Seng received its first Honda award, and met its managing director, Chew Choon Kok.
Chew Choon Kok had married Monica Yeoh Suan Bee, a daughter of an Ipoh textile merchant, in the 1940s, according to a local paper. Hold on to that marriage. It is one of the threads that ties this whole series together.
In 2019, Honda Malaysia itself called Ban Hoe Seng (Auto) "one of the oldest Honda dealerships in Malaysia".
SEMINARY, PSYCHOLOGY, THEN THE FAMILY BUSINESS
Ignatius did not set out to sell cars.
He was a Form Four student at St Michael's Institution, Ipoh, in 1966, he told a local paper. According to the paper, he spent six years studying theology at a seminary in Singapore, before deciding the priesthood was not for him.
He went to London instead, and in 1981 became, in the paper's words, "the only first-class honours graduate in psychology from Brunel University London". There he met Pauline Hsu Sau Lang, from Hong Kong, who was at the same university. They married, and came home to Ipoh.
THE CRASH THAT TOOK 24 OUT OF 32
By the family's account, Ignatius returned to Ipoh in 1982 to learn the business. Pauline, an accounting graduate, computerised the company's accounts.
Then the tin price collapsed in 1985.
Ban Hoe Seng's general manager and sales manager retired, and its sales staff were let go. The family's blog says that of 32 Honda dealers in Malaysia before the crisis, only 8 were left at the end.
This was the moment the business could have ended.
In 1988, according to the family's blog, Ignatius took over the running of Ban Hoe Seng. He took charge of sales; Pauline took charge of the workshop and operations on Kampar Road.
Both were sent to Thailand to learn from the then president of Asian Honda Motor, named in the family's blog as Mitsuro Sato. Ignatius came back, refurbished the showroom and changed how the company was run.
By the family's account, Ban Hoe Seng won Honda's first Dealer of the Year award in 1990. His father gave him and Pauline a free hand in 1992, and retired in 1994.
Ignatius's theory was simple. In the blog's words, "Honda was a product that sold itself": if you had a good product, you only had to manage and service it well. Through the 1985 slump and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the family says, Ban Hoe Seng stayed conservative, prudent and lean, with few loans.
THE YEAR THE DEALERSHIP CHANGED HANDS
In 2012, Ban Hoe Seng gave up the Honda motorcycle dealership it had held since 1958, to focus on cars.
On 20 January 2017, by the family's account, Ignatius, as managing director, received Honda Malaysia's 2016 CEO Award for Elite Dealer. Then, in April 2017, a local paper reported a "new owner in the driving seat": Ban Hoe Seng became Ban Hoe Seng (Auto) Sdn Bhd, a subsidiary of Bonanza Venture Holdings (BVH). BVH's chairman, Dato' Lim Si Boon, is Ignatius's nephew.
Ignatius stayed on as a director. In 2019, the dealership moved to a new showroom in Bandar Baru Sri Klebang, Ipoh, which Honda Malaysia said was the first car showroom in Malaysia to be certified by the Green Building Index.
THE BOOK HE DID NOT KNOW EXISTED
All this time, Ignatius had been collecting.
He told the paper it began in the 1960s, with newspaper cuttings about his uncle, Professor Yeoh Ghim Seng, who won a seat in Singapore's Parliament in 1966 and later became Speaker and acting President of Singapore. Then came his cousin, Tun Dr Lim Keng Yaik, the Perak politician who became a federal minister.
The biggest trigger, he said, came in 1983, when he was at Ipoh Town Hall the night a young woman from Ipoh was crowned Miss Malaysia. Her name was Michelle Yeoh. She is, in his words, "the granddaughter of my mother's brother".
Then, in 1984, he learned there was an autobiography of the family, written by his grandfather's youngest brother, Chew Boon Hong. With that, and articles by the Ipoh doctor and historian Dr Ho Tak Ming, he started putting the story together.
A MANSION FULL OF MEMORIES
In 2012, when the family stopped selling motorcycles, the building that had housed the motorcycle business stood empty. In Ignatius's words, it was "a mansion that I had grown up in". He turned it into a museum. According to the family's blog, it opened to the families on 24 November 2012. (A 2019 cover story in a local paper gives the opening as 2013.)
"They came, they saw and they got excited," he told the paper in 2019. "They supplied me with more information and pictures, especially the ladies of the family."
THE PANDEMIC, AND THE FOURTH FLOOR
Then Covid-19 came. The museum was cut down to a small viewing display, and its space was let to a restaurant.
It could have ended there, too.
Instead, in 2022, Dato' Lim Si Boon offered Ignatius the fourth floor of 1 Lasam, BVH's green-certified headquarters at No. 1, Jalan Lasam, Greentown, Ipoh. The move began on 29 September 2022, according to the family's blog, and the museum received its first guests on 9 October 2022, according to a local paper.
It is now the YLCO (Yeoh Lim Chew & Oh) Museum. In 2024, the paper described it as a museum that "grants access by appointment", with Ignatius as founder and curator. He has invited other Ipoh families, especially those whose ancestors have roads named after them, to add their own family histories.
In December 2023, around 180 family members came from Canada, the UK, the US and Singapore to gather at 1 Lasam. In October 2026, Ipoh's Anthony H S Law shared photos from a visit, calling it the "most well kept secret of Ipoh" and suggesting visitors might find themselves in the family trees too.
FOUR SURNAMES ON ONE WALL
Walk in, and you meet the four families. Here is a glimpse of each, and no more.
- The Yeohs: a textile merchant who, by the panels' account, arrived in 1899, and four sons photographed in front of a "House of Four Wisdoms".
- The Chews: Ignatius's own grandfather and his brothers, and a shipwreck that changed everything.
- The Lims: loan sharks, a 15-year-old girl and a back door.
- The Ohs: the fourth name on the wall, whose ancestor Oh Cheng Keat arrived in 1894, the panels say.
The museum calls them "The Four 'Drinking Families'". You will see why.
SO HOW DOES A HONDA MAN BECOME A FAMILY'S MEMORY?
Back to our smaller question.
The first answer is patience. Ignatius started with newspaper cuttings in the 1960s. In 1984, he learned of the family autobiography. In 2012, the mansion he grew up in stood empty, and he finally had the rooms to fill. When the pandemic took the rooms away, he found new ones.
The second answer is marriage. His mother was a Yeoh, and her mother was a Lim. So one Chew family's album came to hold a Speaker of Singapore's Parliament, a federal minister and a girl from Ipoh who would one day win an Oscar.
As for the debt in China, and how it ends with that Oscar: that is what the next nine parts are for.
THE MILLIONAIRE LESSON
As the founder of Ipoh – The City of Millionaires, here is what I want every student, parent and young entrepreneur to take from Ignatius Chew.
First lesson: write it down.
Family stories vanish when the last person who remembers them is gone. Ignatius started with newspaper cuttings and ended up with a museum.
Second lesson: it is fine to change your path.
Seminary, then psychology, then the family business. Each step taught him something he used later.
Third lesson: in a crash, learn from the best.
When 24 of 32 dealers went under, he went to Thailand to learn from Honda's regional president, and came home and changed the company.
Fourth lesson: be prudent in hard times.
Two recessions, few loans, a lean business. In the family's words, "conservative, prudent and lean".
Fifth lesson: share what you know.
When I wrote my book, The You Economy, it was about how digital media was changing the online economy and the way we do business. Anyone can publish now. But the most valuable thing to publish is something worth keeping. Ignatius turned a private archive into a museum that now invites other families to add their stories.
His grandfather started in a tin-mine kitchen. The business changed hands. The story he kept now gives four families a place to come home to.
Does your family keep its old photographs and stories? Who is the keeper of your family's history? Tell us
From a tin-mine kitchen to a Honda showroom to a museum wall. Ipoh shaped their story. Whose story will Ipoh shape next?
NEXT IN YLCO FAMILIES: PART 2 OF 10, THE YEOHS
Next, we meet the first name on the wall: Yeoh Khuan Joo, the textile merchant who arrived in 1899, married in 1903, and raised four sons in front of a house the panels call the "House of Four Wisdoms".
This story is part of Ipoh Connections, our City of Millionaires heritage series. At EdQuest International School in Ipoh, we believe history, character and critical thinking are best learned through real stories, including the stories of our own city.
Stories in this series are shared for informational and educational purposes. Where accounts differ, we say so. We respect all races, religions and cultures, and we do not represent or endorse any political party or movement.
