Half of the people in Cameron Highlands are of Chinese descent, around 30% Indian, and the rest Malay. The Cameron Highlands is an old British hill station and (according to an informative Indian shopkeeper in town where I bought a ton of tea) since the British already knew how to efficiently utilize the Indian caste system in India they decided to bring them here and plug them into the tea industry. Indians were given specific jobs according to their caste and paid based on the daily amount they produced so there was incentive for work. The British brought over Sri Lankans, who were more highly-educated than the Indians, to supervise. But the Indians kept needing to go back to India and the British couldn't understand why. Since Indians were only here as workers, none of their
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