Tea pickers mainly use their thumb and index fingers, which are stained black from the repeated exposure to tannin from the tea leaves. To avoid this, the pickers now use gloves. For storing the picked tea leaves, tea pickers mostly use wicker baskets called paline in Burmese. After the paline are filled with tea leaves, they are brought back down from the tea hills on a shoulder yoke. Tea picking starts from sunrise and continues through until sunset.