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.

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 years nobody wanted them. Then rubber changed Malaya, and Ipoh named Hugh Low Street after him.

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 School boy, was the only Malay member of the commission that led to the University of Malaya, and Eusoff Hall in Singapore still carries his name.

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 standing. Here is how.

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 by Benjamin Britten were turned down, the new country chose a tune from Perak.