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Malaysia was formerly a British colony for hundreds of years. Before that it was dominated by the Ming and a variety of Indian and Malay princes. Admiral He, the guy behind the exploits of Sinbad the Sailer Man, had his Treasure Fleet base of operations on Penang Island (at the entry to the Sunda Straits), later on the Brits took that area over and also began development of Singapore, at the other end of the Straits.

To a certain degree this is another one of those 'center of the world' areas ~ massive amounts of goods and products travel the straits and always have.

In general the population in Malaysia is mostly Malay, with a large population of Chinese ~ then there are Brits, Indians, Vietnamese, etc. Sun Yet San had his headquarters in Penang.

Buddhism and Islam are well represented there, but there are also Christians. My understanding is most of the information on the internet is fairly reliable ~ so start with Penang and then Kuala Lumpur.

English is widely spoken, particularly in the service industries, as is Hokienese but with a Malaysian flavor ~ that being that upwards of 30% of the vocabulary is Dutch. Mandarin is in widespread use in business/trade, and then there's Bahasa Malaysia ~ which is very similar to Bahasa Indonesie and Tagalog (at least at the level of basic Malay grammar and vocabulary).

These people eat fiery hot food ~ and it's not unusual to see someone fry up a 300,000 scovil unit pepper slathered in garlic to toss into a bowl of noodles for a snack. Then there's the shrimp paste ~ not even going to talk about that.

The country is earning a pre-eminent position in the tea and spice markets with high quality products grown in relatively modern ways with an eye to hygiene. If you buy unground pepper it will state where the pepper came from ~