History of Thai Tea (Part 1)

[Tradition of Tea Culture in Thailand]

While the world map of tea cultivation generally offers a rather stable appearance with little changes over the past centuries, a new spot had to be added to it just recently: Northern Thailand. Where opium fields dominated the mountainous terrain’s altitudes beyond 1000 m until about 20 years ago, making the area an integral part of the infamous Golden Triangle, today a highly diversified variety of cash crops covers the slopes, among them fruit, nuts, vegetables , coffee, and, last but not least, tea.

Unlike many other South East Asian countries, such as China, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia or Taiwan, just to name a few, Thailand and the Thai people traditionally don’t have a tea culture of their own. Only some hill tribes that had migrated from China to Northern Thailand around 200 years ago and the ethnicity of Shan people native to the border region between Northern Thailand and Burma used to collect tea leaves for their own consumption from a local, large-leaved sub-species of Camellia Sinensis that grows wild in the area in form of trees.

Apart from that, tea culture was only rooted in a small class of Thai-Chinese, mainly business people representing a minority within the Thai population. Until recently, tea was even widely unavailable in Thailand.

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