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BOH Tea
In 1929 J.A. Russell and the Ceylon planter A.B. Milne cleared jungle at 5,000 ft in Cameron Highlands for Malaya's first highland tea garden. Russell died four years later. Under Japanese rule the estate was occupied and largely abandoned; through the Emergency, troops were stationed around its plantations. BOH stayed.
Four gardens, three of them on one highland
From a feared loss of European buyers to Malaysia's packet trade
In 1960 the Malayan Emergency ended, and BOH’s distributor saw a threat in the peace. By Tristan Russell’s own account to The Star in 2005, Harpers, the trading company that distributed the estate’s tea, feared that BOH’s European buyers would leave with the British troops. The garden had been cleared from the jungle thirty-one years earlier, and the estate had come through three crises since.
A garden cut from the jungle
BOH began with a land concession. In 1929 J.A. Russell and A.B. Milne, a planter from Ceylon, obtained ground in Cameron Highlands and cleared jungle at 5,000 ft into Malaya’s first highland tea garden, at Habu, near Ringlet. The planting predates Malaysia itself: it was Malaya’s highlands that Russell and Milne cleared, nearly three decades before independence. The company that runs it, BOH Plantations Sdn Bhd, carries the year in its registration: its company number is 192901000013. The Habu garden, the founding site, today has a tea centre and a café.
The founder did not see the estate mature. John Archibald Russell died in 1933, aged 50, four years after the clearing began. Tristan, his only son, had been born in Malaya the year before. BOH’s own histories, and the Chinese-language daily Nanyang Siang Pau, credit his widow, Kathleen, with keeping the business going despite financial difficulties. Other chairmen followed until Tristan Russell took the chair.
A young plantation had lost the man who planned it, and was kept going by his widow. It was the opening test of three that BOH would face before 1960, and the one that set a pattern: the estate would be held together by people who chose to stay with it.
Occupation and the Emergency
The second test was war. During the Japanese occupation of Malaya, the garden that Russell and Milne had cleared thirteen years earlier was occupied and largely abandoned.
The third test lasted twelve years. From 1948 the Malayan Emergency made Cameron Highlands prime ambush territory. Troops were stationed around the plantations, and BOH’s tribute to Tristan Russell recounts that he slept with a pistol under his pillow. The estate operated through the insurgency under troop guard. Occupied in its second decade and guarded through most of its third, it was still operating when the Emergency ended in 1960.
Merdeka, and a market that looked set to leave
Tristan Russell joined the business at the bottom. After studying agriculture in Britain, he told The Star in 2005, he returned in 1954 as junior assistant to the estate manager, Bill Fairlie, on a salary of 500 dollars. He learned the estate from the field while troops were stationed around it.
Independence brought a decision the war had not. At Merdeka in 1957, by Tristan Russell’s own account to The Star in 2005, his stepfather was pessimistic and an uncle was all for selling out. He himself was doubtful but hopeful. The family kept BOH. Later, it took Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB), a state-linked investor, as a local partner.
Three years later the Emergency ended, and the peace brought a worry of a different kind. The estate had already outlived its founder, an occupation and twelve years of insurgency. Now, in Tristan Russell’s telling, again to The Star in 2005, Harpers feared that BOH’s European buyers would leave with the British troops. Harpers was a trading company with an office in Ipoh, and it stood between the estate and its buyers. A second interview, with The Expat, describes the same turn in BOH’s strategy.
Harpers’ fear is known only from Russell’s own recollection, and the change that followed was gradual, not a decision taken on a date. What his account describes is the direction BOH took. Over the years that followed, the company moved downstream into the Malaysian packet trade, packing and branding tea for buyers in the country where it grew it.
The turn needed a manager, and BOH found one in the family. BOH dates Tristan Russell’s chairmanship to August 1966. Russell himself, speaking to The Star in 2005, dated it to 1969. Under him came mechanisation, an expansion of the estates and television advertising built around a mascot, Mr BOH, which BOH describes as among Asia’s first televised company mascots. The company that a distributor had feared would lose its buyers was now advertising on television.
Four gardens and a head office
The geography of the business has spread from the original clearing without leaving the highlands behind. The founding garden at Habu, near Ringlet, now runs a tea centre and café alongside its cultivation. Fairlie, also at Habu, is a highland tea garden. Further north, near Brinchang, the Sungei Palas garden both grows and processes tea, and its tea centre combines tea tourism, a café and retail; Tristan’s Terrace, the visitor wing opened in 2019, sits there. The fourth garden, Bukit Cheeding, lies in the lowlands at Kuala Langat, in Selangor. The head office is in Kuala Lumpur.
The arrangement keeps the stages of the trade under one name: the company grows, blends, packs and brands its own teas, as its executive chairman, Caroline Russell, described the business to World Tea News in 2021, and the tea centres add retail and tourism at the gardens themselves.
A household name, by the numbers
Nanyang Siang Pau calls BOH a household tea brand. The company works four tea gardens: three in Cameron Highlands, at Habu, Fairlie and Sungei Palas, and one lowland estate at Bukit Cheeding, in Selangor. Together they have 1,200 hectares under tea, a figure for planted area, not for all the land the company holds.
By the company’s own figure, repeated in the press from 2019 to 2022, the gardens produce about 4.5 million kg of made tea a year, which Nanyang Siang Pau gave as 5.5 million cups a day. Bernama reports that this is about 70 per cent of Malaysia’s tea output; the wire service does not say where the figure comes from. Caroline Russell, speaking to World Tea News in 2021, attached the same share to Cameron Highlands as a region, the home of BOH, rather than to the company.
BOH Plantations Sdn Bhd is privately held, and its latest public financial figures are for the year ended 31 December 2016. That year it reported revenue of RM181.05 million (~$45 million USD) and net profit of RM28.18 million, a net margin of ~15.6 per cent, according to The Edge, citing Companies Commission filings. The figures are those filed for the company as a whole, and no later filing was found.
Little of BOH’s revenue came from abroad. In 2015 BOH’s chief executive told CNBC that sales in international markets, among them Singapore, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and parts of Europe, accounted for less than 10 per cent of revenue. Fifty-five years after Harpers’ fear, more than nine-tenths of BOH’s sales were at home. That 10 per cent is an upper bound on the overseas share in 2015, and no later figure was found.
Three generations and a state-linked partner
Caroline Russell calls BOH a family business; Bernama, in its own voice, has called it a family-owned one. The 2019 share register gives the outline. As at November 2019, according to The Edge citing Companies Commission data, J.A. Russell & Company Sdn Bhd, the holding company that carries the founder’s name, held 70.99 per cent of BOH Plantations Sdn Bhd; PNB held 25.61 per cent; and the remaining 3.4 per cent sat with a number of shareholders, Russell family members among them. The holding company’s own register, in the same Companies Commission data, named Tristan Russell with 16.52 per cent and Caroline Russell with 1.74 per cent, alongside another individual and four corporate holders, one of them with 28.43 per cent, whose owners are not public; the named holders account for 86.38 per cent, and the source does not itemise the rest. Tristan Russell’s holding is as recorded in 2019, four years before his death. The local partner taken on after Merdeka was still there, holding just over a quarter of the operating company. How the shares have moved since Tristan Russell’s death in 2023 is not publicly documented.
The third generation came up through the business. Caroline Russell joined the marketing department in 1988 after a business degree, took charge of the tea estates in 2002 and became chief executive in 2003. “BOH is a family business that runs in our blood,” she told World Tea News in 2021. “The business was led by my father, Tristan, for many many years, and I joined after I left university where I had completed a degree in business studies.” In 2019 her father retired, and she became executive chairman. The following year Forbes named her one of 25 women on its Asia Power Businesswomen list. By 2024 the chief executive was Jason Foo, from outside the family, serving under her.
Labour, drought and land
The estate’s later pressures have been quieter than war, but persistent. In October 2015, with the ringgit falling, BOH’s chief executive described to CNBC a squeeze from rising input costs and a reliance on workers from Nepal and Indonesia; the company had also begun pushing online sales in China. In 2016 Caroline Russell told the Malay Mail that drought threatened not only the yield but the tea itself.
In November 2019 BOH appointed CBRE WTW to seek expressions of interest for 651 acres of its lowland estate at Kuala Langat, Selangor, the Bukit Cheeding property. The Edge’s report on that offer, citing Companies Commission filings, is also the source of the company’s latest public financial figures and of its shareholding as at that month. Earlier that year, in July, it had marked its 90th anniversary by opening Tristan’s Terrace, the visitor wing at the Sungei Palas tea centre named after Tristan Russell; BOH’s announcement of the opening is where the company dates his chairmanship to August 1966. When travel restrictions thinned visitor numbers at the tea gardens in 2021, the company was building a channel in the United States through Amazon, a business-to-business website and a West Coast food broker, Pinski-Portugal Associates. The pandemic reached the tourism side of the business, the tea centres.
Ninety-five years on
Tristan Russell died on 2 November 2023, aged 91. BOH calls him its longest-serving chairman. At Merdeka he had been doubtful but hopeful; he lived to hand the chair to his daughter.
The company marked its 95th anniversary in July 2024 with a five-day roadshow and a limited-edition tea named Tristan’s Reserve, launched eight months after his death. That year its chief executive was Jason Foo, serving under executive chairman Caroline Russell, the third generation of Russells to lead an estate whose distributor once feared it would lose its European buyers. The record runs the line from the founder, who died four years after the clearing, through his son, chairman until 2019, to his granddaughter, chief executive from 2003 and executive chairman since 2019.
Researched 29 sources in English, Chinese, Malay.