Written By Po-Yi Hung
Image credit: Forest, swidden agriculture, and tea gardens are layered across the hills of northern Thailand’s Golden Triangle. Photo by Po-Yi Hung.
When you hear the words “northern Thailand,” what picture comes to mind? For many people, the image arrives almost instantly: bright crimson poppy fields, the raw material of opium, and the shadowy black-market trade of the Golden Triangle. Others might recall a different set of associations that circulated for decades in the Chinese-speaking world: the “lost army” of Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers, the Chinese Nationalist troops who never made it to Taiwan, stranded after the Chinese Civil War.
Yet the northern Thailand of today bears little resemblance to those images. The hillsides are no longer carpeted with poppies, and the former soldiers and their descendants have long since laid down their rifles to become farmers. So, what do you actually see if you travel through these highlands now? More often than not, you see neat rows of tea bushes terraced across the slopes, many of them planted with varieties, machinery, and know-how that came directly from Taiwan.
This is the story I have spent years following, and it is the core of my new book. It is a story about how a single plant can carry the weight of geopolitics and how the simple act of growing tea on a remote mountainside turns out to be entangled with diplomacy, national borders, and the quiet business of who controls a piece of land. This is not just a story about crops but about how Taiwan quietly reshaped a borderland.
Image credit. The cover of Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders, and Territoriality (University of Washington Press, 2026).
The Golden Triangle
To understand how Taiwan’s tea ended up here, we have to begin with the Golden Triangle, the borderland where Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos meet. It is a vast region of roughly 200,000 square kilometres, threaded by the Mekong River and folded into ridge after ridge of mountains, with basins and river valleys tucked between them. On the Thai side, the Golden Triangle spans three northern provinces: Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, and Mae Hong Son. More than eighty per cent of this territory is mountainous.
For a long time, before cash crops spread across these rugged hills, agriculture here took two main forms. Lowland Thai and Karen communities grew rice on terraced paddies, while many other upland groups practised shifting cultivation, clearing and burning patches of forest to plant, then moving on. As the local population grew and steady work became harder to find, land that once rested for five to ten years between plantings was given only one or two years to recover. Plots were farmed more and more intensively, and a growing number of people turned to opium poppies as a way to make a living.
Poppies meant poverty, deforestation, environmental damage, and a drug economy that the state struggled to contain. So, from the 1960s onwards, a wide range of Thai and international organisations set up stations and projects across these highlands, all in pursuit of the same goal: to find crops that could replace the poppy. A suitable replacement, by the standards of these agencies, had to be economically viable, relatively gentle on the environment, and crucially, something local farmers would actually be willing to grow. It was in this search for an alternative that tea found its opening.
The Chinese who grew tea in the hills
The people who would carry tea into these mountains had arrived by a long and difficult road. During the Chinese Civil War, KMT forces retreated into northern Myanmar and recruited local Chinese into their ranks. After the Nationalist government relocated to Taiwan, these troops remained behind. Twice, as in 1953–54 and again in 1961, Taiwan tried to evacuate the soldiers and their families from the Golden Triangle back to the island. But many chose to stay. As people in the region tell it, Taiwan felt impossibly far from home, and more than a few soldiers had developed an opium habit and were reluctant to leave the very place that supplied it.
Having declined evacuation, in 1964, this group of soldiers and dependents crossed, with the tacit approval of the Thai military, into the borderlands between northern Thailand and Myanmar. There were two main contingents: the Third Army under General Li Wenhuan and the Fifth Army under General Tuan Hsi-wen. Soon after settling in, both lost what remained of their support from the Nationalist government. To keep their communities fed, they became entangled in the opium trade and in the black-market movement of goods out of Myanmar, such as jade from Kachin State. Many of their descendants describe these choices as acts of desperation rather than ambition: once all outside aid had dried up, the underground economy was, for them, the only way to keep an entire community alive.
Poppy cultivation and the drug trade in the Golden Triangle peaked in the early 1980s, at a time when the Thai government still did not fully control its border. To address the problem, the Thai royal family had begun rolling out the Royal Project in the 1960s. After Taiwan and Thailand severed formal diplomatic relations in 1975, Taiwan looked for other ways to stay close to the Thai crown, and cross-border agricultural assistance became one of them. Agricultural cooperation became a quiet form of diplomacy after official ties were cut. At first, though, the Royal Project focused mainly on the ethnic minority communities who grew poppies, not on the KMT settlements, and tea was not yet the crop of choice.
How tea spread through the soldiers’ settlements
Two things came together in the early 1980s. Taiwan began to take an active role in the Royal Project, and at the same time, the so-called “lost army” reconnected with the public back in Taiwan. Taiwan was then in the middle of rapid economic growth and rising prosperity, and as journalists and writers told the story of these “forgotten” Chinese communities, public sympathy swelled. A wave of humanitarian aid followed. Organisations such as the Free China Relief Association (FCRA), based in Taiwan (nowadays the Chinese Association for Relief and Ensuing Services), once known by a name referencing relief for compatriots on the mainland, extended assistance across the border, and the transfer of Taiwanese agricultural technology was one part of that effort.
Agricultural workers and experts from Taiwan began introducing new cash crops and cultivation techniques, including oolong tea, among them, into the Chinese settlements of the Golden Triangle. The transfer took hold most successfully in Chiang Rai Province, where veterans of the former Fifth Army had settled, and it completely transformed the agricultural landscape. Today, the northern Thai Golden Triangle is one of the country’s major tea-producing regions, and in the Chinese areas of Chiang Rai in particular, tea gardens blanket the hillsides. Tea has become one of the community’s economic mainstays.
Tea and the control of the border
Here is where the story turns from agriculture toward politics. Through this cross-border tea trade, the Thai state also gained real control over its territory. Before the 1980s, the Cold War-era forests of northern Thailand sheltered not only the KMT troops who had drifted here from the Chinese Civil War but also communist guerrillas, all of it overlaid by a thriving underground drug economy. On the map, the region looked like sovereign Thai land; on the ground, competing forces contested it. Agriculture became a tool for turning the map into reality.
Planting tea from Taiwan in these hills was never as simple as carrying seedlings up the mountain and pushing them into the soil. First, the existing forest had to be cleared and reshaped into orderly terraced gardens, each one measured and recorded as official government data. Then came the machinery for processing tea and the building of factories. With them came water, electricity, and other infrastructure and modern roads to connect these once-isolated communities to the outside world.
In other words, the tea that came from Taiwan also brought the trappings of “modernisation.” And the process of agricultural modernisation enabled the Thai government to map its border territory more precisely, allocate resources like water and power more authoritatively, and make remote areas much easier to reach. Underlying all of it was something more fundamental: the state’s growing ability to keep track of and govern the people living along the border. In this sense, tea was not only a substitute for opium; it was also an instrument for turning a loosely governed frontier into a governable borderland.
Connecting to the world
That same political process pulled the people of northern Thailand into the rhythms of the market economy and tied them to distant corners of the globe. The region’s tea industry first looked to Taiwan as its main market, only to discover that Taiwan increasingly preferred to import its tea from Vietnam. So, producers adapted. Some partnered with Thai bottled-tea companies; others pursued their own product development or organic certification to break into Chinese, European, and American markets. When the US–China trade war recently opened up, northern Thailand’s tea may even have found a new niche in exporting to the United States.
Today’s northern Thailand has fewer crimson poppies and far more emerald tea gardens. The “lost army” of an earlier era has hung up its weapons and gone back to the land as tea farmers. In that transformation, we can see the convergence of many different journeys, both the movement of people and that of plants. Where northern Thailand’s tea comes from and where it goes is not only a miniature history of cross-border agricultural transfer between Taiwan and Thailand. It is also a revealing way to glimpse Taiwan’s presence and its quiet reach across Southeast Asia.
Po-Yi Hung is a professor of geography at National Taiwan University. This article draws on his new book, Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders, and Territoriality (University of Washington Press, July 21, 2026), which follows tea varieties, processing knowledge, and merchants across Taiwan and Southeast Asia to show how a single leaf becomes a force in global politics, from oolong in the Thai highlands to bubble tea in Vietnam.