R134

R134 is one of the classic Malaysian Department of Agriculture selections, part of the group of clones chosen in 1973 for the first serious Australian evaluation precisely because some had been picked out by British planters before independence and so suited European as well as Asian palates. That judgement held up: in the 1984 Queensland harvest R134 fruit was significantly heavier than R99, R156 and R3, was the first clone to ripen, was preferred on visual appearance for its size and near-spherical shape, and finished second overall in taste ranking. MARDI's Malaysian rambutan breeding programme used R134 (then called Singapura) as one of its two seed parents. It remains a standard reference clone in the Northern Territory, in Hawaii's cultivar plantings and in the USDA-ARS Puerto Rico trial.