Chariot
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Cover: Sir Hugh Low with Perak chiefs, 1880 or 1881 (photo: Xavier Brau de Saint-Pol Lias, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, TM-60016187, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons); a portrait drawing of Hugh Low as a young man (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons); tapping rubber trees on a Malayan estate, c. 1910 (photo: C.J. Kleingrothe, public domain, KITLV collection 79938, via Wikimedia Commons). Background: the Resident's house at Kuala Kangsar, c. 1910 (photo: C.J. Kleingrothe, public domain, KITLV collection 79997, via Wikimedia Commons); tapped rubber trees with latex cups, image by jcomp on Freepik.
Sir Hugh Low spent nearly thirty years on a small island, passed over for the top job. Then, in a garden by the Perak River, he looked after the trees nobody wanted.
Both were written off. Both changed the fortunes of Malaya. Here is how.
You have crossed the Kinta River on Jalan Sultan Iskandar more times than you can count, past the old shophouses of Ipoh's Old Town and New Town, on the road your grandparents still call Hugh Low Street.
Most of us never ask who Hugh Low was.
Who was Sir Hugh Low? Sir Hugh Low (1824–1905) was a British botanist and colonial administrator who served as British Resident of Perak, Malaysia, from 1877 to 1889. In 1877, young Hevea rubber plants were planted in his Residency garden at Kuala Kangsar, Perak, under his care: the start of rubber growing in Malaysia. Hugh Low Street in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia, now Jalan Sultan Iskandar, was named after him.
In short: the first rubber trees in Malaysia grew in Hugh Low's garden at Kuala Kangsar, from 1877.
Here is the strange part. For almost twenty years, those trees were the trees nobody wanted. And the man who looked after them had spent nearly three decades being passed over.
So how did an overlooked man and an unwanted tree end up helping to make Malaya the world's biggest rubber producer? And is one of those very first trees still standing today?
Hold on to both questions. We will come back to them.
THE STREET YOU NEVER QUESTIONED
Hugh Low Street was one of the first streets in Ipoh, laid out in the late nineteenth century. According to Perak heritage researchers, it first ran from the police post on the higher ground down to the west bank of the Kinta River.
In 1890, a wooden Hugh Low Bridge was built across the river for "wheeled traffic": gharries, bullock carts and rickshaws. As the crowded town spilled over the water, Old Town and New Town were born. An iron bridge replaced the wooden one in 1900, and it was strengthened and widened in 1930.
Earlier this week, we told you the story of Masjid Panglima Kinta, the 1898 mosque by the Kinta River. In New Town, heritage researchers say, Hugh Low Street once turned into the road beside that very mosque.
In 1975, the street was renamed Jalan Sultan Iskandar, after Sultan Iskandar Shah, the 30th Sultan of Perak. Many Ipoh people still use the old name.
But Hugh Low never set out to have a street named after him in a tin town. He set out to hunt orchids.
THE ORCHID HUNTER
Hugh Low was born on 10 May 1824 in Upper Clapton, England. His father, also named Hugh, was a Scottish nurseryman, and the boy grew up among plants.
At about 20, his father sent him to Southeast Asia to collect orchids. He soon joined James Brooke, the "White Rajah" of Sarawak, and came to know the country well enough to write a book about Sarawak.
In 1848, Low went with Brooke, now Governor of the new British colony of Labuan, a small island off Borneo, as a colonial official.
In 1851 he made the first documented climb of Mount Kinabalu. Its highest summit is still called Low's Peak.
A brilliant start. And then, for a very long time, almost nothing.
THIRTY YEARS ON A SMALL ISLAND
Labuan had been meant to become a busy port. It never did. It stayed small, isolated and unhealthy.
In 1851, Low's wife, Catherine, died there of fever.
He worked as colonial treasurer and police magistrate, and he stood in as governor whenever a new one had not yet arrived, for a total of about eight years, by one biography's count. But the Colonial Office refused to give him the job itself. A bitter quarrel with one governor, John Pope Hennessy, who had married Low's own daughter, ended, that same biography says, with both men censured.
His main comfort through those years, one biography says, was his garden: about twelve acres of carefully chosen plants.
By 1877, Hugh Low was 52. He had spent nearly thirty years on an island most people had forgotten. Most of us would have called that a career that was over.
It wasn't.
THE JOB NOBODY WANTED
Perak, in 1877, was a state in crisis.
As we told you at the Birch Memorial Clock Tower, the first British Resident of Perak, J.W.W. Birch, was killed at Pasir Salak in 1875. War followed. Many Malay chiefs were dead or in exile. The next Resident took over a bankrupt state, and resigned in early 1877.
The Colonial Office needed someone who spoke Malay, understood Malay custom, and could calm a resentful state. The man they had passed over for decades suddenly looked like the right one.
In April 1877, Hugh Low became British Resident of Perak.
He moved his headquarters to Kuala Kangsar, close to the Malay court, and went out to meet the chiefs. He set up a State Council with Malay, Chinese and British members. He worked closely with the tin magnate Kapitan Chung Keng Quee, who became one of his confidants.
It was still colonial rule, and historians note that he was careful to give the Malay rulers no real independence. But after years of war, Perak had peace, and Low stayed for twelve years.
And in his garden at Kuala Kangsar, something new was growing.
22 SEEDLINGS AND A GARDEN BY THE PERAK RIVER
In 1877, 22 young Hevea rubber plants, raised at Kew Gardens in London from Brazilian stock, reached Singapore.
Soon afterwards, H.J. Murton, the superintendent of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, took some of them north to Perak. They were planted in the Residency garden at Kuala Kangsar, and the new Resident, the man who had spent thirty years with his garden, looked after them.
The Heveas grew well. By 1881 they were producing seed. In 1884, Frank Swettenham, later one of the most powerful men in British Malaya, planted out 400 seeds from the Kuala Kangsar trees.
It should have been the start of a boom. It wasn't.
THE TREES NOBODY WANTED
In 1883, Low sent rubber samples to England. They were not well received.
In Singapore, the Botanic Gardens' superintendent, Nathaniel Cantley, took the view in 1885 that their success was far from certain, and that local rubber plants looked more promising. A local newspaper sniffed in 1886 that "the exotics do not after all possess a very absorbing interest".
Planters had other plans. Coffee was the crop of the moment, along with pepper and gambier. Rubber trees take years to grow before they can be tapped, and almost nobody wanted to wait.
In 1891, Leonard Wray of the Perak Museum in Taiping urged that rubber be planted on Perak's waste land. Some trees were planted at Kuala Kangsar. A few years later, he wrote: "It is much to be regretted that more were not planted at that time."
Hugh Low retired in 1889 and left Perak. In 1905, the year he died in Alassio, Italy, Malaya exported just 130 tons of rubber.
He had looked after the trees. He would never see the boom.
THEN THE WORLD CHANGED ITS MIND
The turn came from an unexpected place: coffee.
In the mid-1890s, coffee prices fell as Brazil's harvests recovered, and disease attacked Malaya's coffee bushes. Planters needed something else. Around 1896, Tan Chay Yan planted rubber on his land at Bukit Lintang in Malacca, among the first commercial rubber plantings in Malaya. In Singapore, Henry Ridley, director of the Botanic Gardens, promoted rubber so tirelessly that he was reportedly nicknamed "Mad Ridley", and worked out a better way to tap the trees.
Then the world wanted tyres: for bicycles first, and then for motor cars.
The trees nobody wanted became the trees everybody wanted. By 1919, Malaya was exporting about half of the world's rubber, and for most of the years between the two World Wars it supplied around half of the world's rubber.
It was not only for big estates. By 1921, smallholders, ordinary families, held 48 per cent of the land under rubber in Perak.
Here in the Kinta Valley, the world's richest tin field, rubber became the second engine. In 1925, rubber and tin together brought in 72.1 per cent of Malaya's export earnings. Tin men put their money into rubber too: Eu Tong Sen, the Ipoh-schooled "King of Tin", moved from tin into rubber, property and banking.
Much of that wealth flowed to British companies, and much of the tapping was done by migrant workers, many of them from India. But for Ipoh, for Perak and for Malaya, rubber changed everything.
SO, IS ONE OF THOSE FIRST TREES STILL STANDING?
Yes, or so Kuala Kangsar believes.
Near the district office in Kuala Kangsar stands an old rubber tree said to be the last survivor of the first trees planted there in 1877. By one local account, nine were planted and only this one lived. It is believed to be more than 140 years old.
Accounts differ on the details: how many seedlings there were, and whose hands put them in the ground. But the story ends in the same place. A garden by the Perak River, looked after by a man the world had nearly forgotten.
And the answer to our first question? The man and the tree had the same problem: the world was not ready for them yet. Hugh Low waited nearly thirty years for his chance, and the rubber tree waited almost twenty for the world to want it. Both were ready when the moment came.
THE MILLIONAIRE LESSON
As the founder of Ipoh – The City of Millionaires, here is what I want every student, parent and young entrepreneur to take from Hugh Low.
Your years of being overlooked are not wasted if you spend them growing something. Low's long years in a Labuan garden prepared him for Kuala Kangsar.
The world does not pay you for planting. It pays you for still being there when the trees are ready.
Have you ever seen the old rubber tree in Kuala Kangsar, or do you still call it Hugh Low Street? Tell us
His name is on our street, and his trees are in our hills. Ipoh shaped their story. Whose story will Ipoh shape next?
This story carries our Ipoh Connections label, for people who were not born in Ipoh but whose life or work has a real tie to the city. It is part of Ipoh Stories, our City of Millionaires heritage series. At EdQuest International School in Ipoh, we believe history, character and critical thinking are best learned through real stories, including the stories of our own city.
Stories in this series are shared for informational and educational purposes. Where accounts differ, we say so. We respect all races, religions and cultures, and we do not represent or endorse any political party or movement.
