Written by Gawin Tiansuwan (กวิน เทียนสุวรรณ)
Image credit: Hanging out at the local tea space in Taipei with classmates and new friends, 2023. Photo by the author.
I left Thailand in late 2018 to return to Sweden and continue working with the same organisation. I had gone back to my friends with whom I had previously drunk tea, but now with a whole different setup. Some of my best friends back in Stockholm later started to shift their practices as well, as they, too, appreciated drinking unscented tea. My preaching would continue as I moved places, carrying tea with me to Vancouver, Canada, where I attended my master’s degree. It was quite a bizarre time during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there were periods when the restrictions were lifted, and I served tea to my closest circle of friends from class. One of my classmates, Maya, later told me that she was extremely grateful for our tea moments together, as that was a grounding experience for her during a really stressful and anxious time in her life. She believed that tea saved her, in a way. Another close friend, Serena, started brewing tea herself and still does to this day. It truly is incredible how much power that tea holds, whether as a tool for self-cultivation or as a social act.
Throughout the many years of brewing tea, however, one question could not be answered: how exactly was tea made? And why does it taste the way that it does? Reading about it only raised more questions, and I wished to see the process firsthand. After I graduated with my master’s, I felt I needed a break and to surround myself with what I love, which was tea. By that time, I had also made quite a few more trips to Taiwan. I made friends at a tea house on Yong Kang Street in Taipei called The Old Tea Can (老茶罐), which, during a week and a half’s stay in Taipei, I visited daily. By the time that I was going to leave, the owners and regulars there had gifted me a bag of tea signed with all of their names. I knew then that I had family in Taipei.
Already infatuated with Taiwan, I knew I wanted the chance to spend extended time there and truly immerse myself, not only in tea but also in the language. I knew that without learning Mandarin, learning about tea would not be as straightforward. And so, I decided to apply for the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship and received a 6-month stipend. I ended up staying for two years. I stated in the motivation letter that “.. my dream is to one day be able to read and research about tea on my own in Mandarin,” and although reading is still quite a challenge, my deep immersion in the local tea circle has improved my Mandarin quickly. I came across people who were fascinated that a foreigner like me could like tea as much as they did. Suddenly, life was filled with all things tea; I attended several tea parties, events, lectures, markets, exhibitions, expos, and hosted several tea sessions myself.
I had the pleasure of sharing a house with a Japanese-Taiwanese roommate, Natsu, who also appreciated tea. Fate had somehow brought us together, and we found a beautiful space near the well-known Dihua Street. We later found out that the building we lived in had been where the workers of a nearby tea estate used to live and that our street, Guide Street (貴德街), was the street of tea in Taipei during the peak era before the port was moved upstream. With such a beautiful and historic space, we wanted to share the experience with others. My roommate, my best friend from the tea circle, and I started hosting tea events at our home, which turned out to be quite an adventure. Now, I am generally neither a spiritual nor a religious person (after all, I was raised in the atheist capital of the world), but there was a concept often in the tea circles that resonated with me: cha yuan (茶緣) or “the fate of tea,” which speaks to the serendipity of encounters through tea. That was when things seemed too good to be a coincidence; people could simply say it was cha yuan.
The epitome of my tea journey in Taiwan was when my friend and I were introduced to a young tea master in Pinglin, Jinxing, who, at the time, was working independently on his tea production. We begged him to show us and teach us, as I was deeply curious about the process. I believe he was truly sharing out of passion; after all, the processing technique is regarded as an industry secret. The most important teaching Jinxing gave was the view of tea-making as both a craft and a form of art. People often told me, “Nobody makes tea like him,” and watching him work taught me how care and intention would shape the tea’s character. I will always remember his words: kan cha zuo cha (看茶做茶), which means one should always pay attention to the state and condition of the tea leaves to make decisions during tea processing. It is as if the tea leaves spoke to him, and he just did what he was told.
Arranging tea leaves for solar withering with my mentor, Jinxing. 2023. Photo by the author.
During the breaks between semesters at the Mandarin school, I would return to Thailand. After meeting my mentor, my visit to Thailand also changed my agenda – I became quite interested in learning more about Thai tea. There is generally a large gap in the public knowledge of tea in Thailand. Thai people have little knowledge about what tea actually is and why it exists for us. Tea is there, but we haven’t really taken the step back to ask, “Wait, what am I drinking?” and “How did it get here?” Even as a tea drinker myself, learning and appreciating Thai tea was not on my mind. I knew it existed; I had even tasted it, but there was a feeling among tea circles that it was not as compelling as teas from China. Once I started exploring the many mountains of Northern Thailand, I realised that even at the local level, there were not many people who could make tea, at least not the fine tea type of production. That would explain why it was challenging to locate good-quality tea. I found it baffling that knowledge was scattered and came from completely different directions.
Thai milk tea originated during World War II, when the Thai government granted land to a few businesses to start with domestic production. This was possibly also the era when we realised that our native tea trees were also suitable for tea production. None of the oolong tea cultivars in Thailand is considered native; they were actually imported from Taiwan as a result of the historical context when the KMT soldiers fled to Southeast Asia during the peak of the civil war. Quite a few of our Assam tea plantations were established through the Thai Royal Project, which encouraged farmers to switch from planting opium to planting tea. Finally, native tea trees are growing wild throughout the mountains of Northern Thailand, and yet the average Thai person seems to know even less about them.
In our forests, some trees are so old that no one remembers who planted them, or if anyone ever did, and the locals may not know them as tea trees but as the ‘miang’ เหมี้ยง tree. The villagers tell me that they do not remember anyone making tea, because they had always been making ‘miang,’ a snack in which tea leaves are steamed after harvest and then fermented. The snack offered an intense flavour and a caffeine boost to get you going for the rest of the day. The locals never really needed to make tea from brewing leaves. However, demand for Miang is declining, and so farmers have uprooted a significant number of tea trees and replaced them with other cash crops. The Miang-producing villagers generally lack knowledge of tea production and have therefore never tried to refine tea leaves for brewing.
Wild tea trees in the district of Wiang Pa Pao, Chiangrai. May, 2026. Photo by the author.
Again, counting on the fate of tea, I became acquainted with a producer who recently started making tea in one of the villages, and he learned tea-making from his teacher, an ethnic minority in Chiang Rai, who in turn learned it from Yunnan. With my background in tea production from Taiwan, I am now working with him to make tea from these native tea trees and teach villagers the basics, while slowly expanding the capacity of local producers. In the meantime, I am also promoting tea as a culture and using the framework of tea arts (茶藝) to make stronger connections between tea and Thai arts and crafts. It is quite a contemporary perspective, and to me it makes a lot of sense. When it is difficult to define what ‘tradition’ is and there are plenty of gaps to be filled, it is then up to the limits of the imagination of Thai people to determine what is possible. It appears that this is what my journey has led up to. Without my passionate and wandering soul and a commitment to learn about tea, I could not be in the position that I am now. And as I represent the voice of Thai tea, I will always remember the lands, cultures, people, and the fates that shaped me.
Gawin is a multi-cultural tea practitioner who was born in Thailand, grew up in Sweden, studied tea-making in Taiwan, and is now based in Thailand as a producer of Thai wild tea under the name Miang Craft (IG: miang.craft).
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Taiwan Tea Cultures and Relational Routes‘.