A brief description and history of Tea in the Cameron Highlands

The Cameron Highlands provide an ideal climate for tea growing. There are several large and well established tea estates, including the Bharat and Gold Dollar tea estates, located in the lower highlands between Ringlet and Tanah Rata, and the Blue Valley tea estate in the upper highlands. The largest and best know estate in the Highlands is the Boh Plantation ( Boh tea is the standard household brand in most Malaysian homes) which has 1200 hectares (a hectare is 2.5 acres) of mature plantations. Both the Farlie ( lower highlands) and the Sungei Palas (upper highlands) operate free guided tours of their factories, every hour or so, daily except Monday ( the factories have no tea to process on a Monday as no tea is picked on Sunday). The Sungei Palas is probably the more attractive of the two, perched high on the steep, green hills above Brinchang, and is less inundated with visitors.

Like all Cameronian tea estates, Boh plantations employ a hard-core of tea pluckers whose forebears originally came from South India. Many of the workers are third or fourth generation having been brought here in the late 1920's to start the first plantations. The workers live in self-contained quarters on the estates, most of which have their own shops and school. The original tea plants also came from India., mainly Darjeeling stocks, many of which are still productive. Now bonsai specimens, they can be recognised by their thick trunks and dark green leaves. Bushes planted from the 1960's onward are mainly cloned varieties and have much lighter leaves.

During the 1920's the Cameron Highlands were under the control of a British Governor. The founder of the Boh Plantation John Archibald Russell (know to his friends as Archie) was the son of a British government official. In conjunction with Mr. AB Milne an old tea planter from Ceylon, in 1927, JA Russell applied for and was granted a concession of land in the Cameron Highlands. This became the Boh Estate which was carved out of virgin jungle, an extraordinary feat considering that the work was carried out without machinery and only with the assistance of mules.

In the 1920's, tea plucking and processing was also an all manual process. Nowadays, machinery is used, although it is still manually intensive, with an average of 6 to 10 people required to look after each acre of plantation. Part of the reason for the intensity of manual labour is that tea bushes are grown on slopes that in places are so steep that machinery is almost impossible to use, 45 degree slopes are commonplace. However, on the whole, the workers use a plucking machine, a hefty gadget requiring two people to hold it, while double blades slice off the top most shoots (two leaves and a bud being the golden rule) which are blown into a bag, otherwise hand shears are used. Plucking takes place all year round every 15 to 20 days, depending on growth, which tends to be slower during the rainy season. Maintenance is a year round task. The bushes need to be regularly fertilised and weeded, while pruning takes place every 3 years

The green tea leaf is weighed (pluckers are paid by the kilo) before being taken to the factory to be processed, where every 5 kilo's of green tea produces around 1 Kilo of tea. The first process in the factory is to whither the leaves under artificial blowers, for 12 to 16 hours, depending on the moisture content. The leaves are then rolled, or broken up using a rotary blade and graded before being put into trays for fermentation. It is the rolling and cracking that exposes the cells and juices to the air, they absorb oxygen. In fact oxidation might be a better word than fermentation. A significant chemical change is brought about. The essential oils which give tea its aroma are liberated starting the fermentation process. At the right stage of fermentation, as judged by the smell the tea is fired in an oven, the timing of which is critical, which kills the fermentation process and the fired tea is again graded. The tea is mostly packaged in Kuala Lumpur, from where it is distributed, mainly to local destinations as the quantity is limited.

Anyone interested in a full and informative history of Tea should read J M Scott, "The Tea Story" published by Heinemann Ltd., 1964.

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