Cameron Highlands

The plateau was known to the Orang Asli peoples of the Titiwangsa range long before it appeared on any map. It takes its English name from William Cameron, a government surveyor who reported a stretch of gentle highland country during an 1885 survey, though he did not fix its position and the plateau was not relocated for years afterwards. Serious interest came only in the 1920s, when the colonial administration looked for a hill station where Europeans could escape the heat of the lowlands.

A road was pushed up from Tapah, and from the early 1930s the district was developed as a retreat of bungalows, a golf course, a convalescent hospital and mock-Tudor hotels, alongside something more commercially important: tea. BOH Plantations was founded at Habu in 1929 by the British-born businessman J. A. Russell, the first hill-country estate in Malaya, and others followed; the work was done largely by Tamil labourers recruited from South India, whose descendants still live in the estate villages. Chinese smallholders followed, growing vegetables and flowers in a climate that suited European crops.

After independence the hill station became a Malaysian holiday destination rather than a colonial one, and the district is also remembered for the disappearance of the American silk businessman Jim Thompson, who walked out of a bungalow here in March 1967 and was never found. From the 1990s the vegetable and flower industry expanded enormously, covering whole valleys in plastic greenhouses, while hotels and apartment blocks went up in Brinchang and Tanah Rata. That growth has come with landslides, water problems and a long-running argument about land clearing on the slopes.

The highlands are unlike anywhere else in Malaysia, and the differences begin with the weather: people wear jackets, drink hot tea by choice, and eat steamboat in the evening because it is cold. The British legacy is visible in the mock-Tudor architecture, the scones served on the tea estates and the old bungalow names, which sit oddly among the greenhouses and the temples.

The population is unusually mixed for a rural district. Tamil families descended from the estate workforce keep Hindu temples on the plantations and mark Thaipusam and Deepavali; Chinese Malaysian farming families run much of the vegetable and flower industry and the hotels; Malay communities live in the towns and the northern valleys. Orang Asli groups, mainly Semai, live in villages in the surrounding forest and sell forest produce, honey and handicrafts, and a large migrant workforce from Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia does much of the farm labour.

Visitor culture here is domestic rather than international. Most people who come are Malaysian and Singaporean families on a weekend away, photographing strawberry rows and tea slopes, buying vegetables and honey to take home, and eating at the night market. Foreign backpackers make up a smaller, older stream, drawn by the walking trails around Tanah Rata. Dress and manners follow ordinary small-town Malaysian norms, and the district is quiet after dark.

The district has a population of about 33,000, spread between Ringlet, Tanah Rata, Brinchang, Kampung Raja and the farming settlements along the valleys, with Chinese Malaysians and Bumiputera communities the largest groups and a sizeable non-citizen workforce. Agriculture is the backbone: cool-climate vegetables — cabbages, lettuces, tomatoes, capsicums — flowers, strawberries and tea, grown in greenhouses and on terraced slopes and trucked down to Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and beyond, often overnight.

Tourism is the other half of the economy, and the two overlap: farms charge admission, estates run tea rooms, and the weekend traffic keeps hotels, restaurants and tour vans in business. Work on the farms is done largely by migrant labourers living in quarters on the smallholdings, a subject of periodic public debate along with the amount of forest cleared for new planting.

The working day starts early and in the cold, with produce loaded before dawn and the markets stocked by mid-morning. Afternoons are misty and quiet; evenings are short, and the towns shut early. Water supply, landslides after heavy rain, traffic on the single road and the legality of land clearing on the slopes are the recurring local issues, and enforcement operations against illegal farms make the national news from time to time.

Steamboat is the local institution: a pot of stock kept simmering at the table while diners cook vegetables picked that morning, mushrooms, noodles, tofu, meat and seafood in it. Almost every restaurant in Tanah Rata and Brinchang serves one, and the quality of the vegetables is the point. Alongside it, the district's farms supply the sweetcorn eaten grilled at the night market, the mushrooms sold in boxes at roadside stalls, and the salad vegetables that reach the rest of the country.

Tea is the other signature. The estates produce black tea drunk plain, with milk or as the sweet, condensed-milk teh tarik found across Malaysia, and the estate tea rooms serve it English fashion with scones and cake. Strawberries appear in every possible form — fresh, in jam, in ice cream, in chocolate and in cordials — and honey from the highland hives is sold beside them.

Everyday eating in the towns is standard Malaysian, with an Indian slant inherited from the estates: roti canai and teh tarik for breakfast, banana leaf rice and curries at lunch, Chinese noodle shops and Malay warungs serving nasi lemak and fried rice. Hot soups, ginger drinks and bak kut teh, the peppery pork rib broth, have an obvious appeal in the cold, and the night market adds grilled sausages, steamed sweet potatoes and cups of hot soya milk.