Mae Salong

Mae Salong (Doi Mae Salong, 美斯乐) is the tea mountain of Northern Thailand: a ridge in Chiang Rai province with gardens at roughly 1,200–1,800 metres, a few hours north of Chiang Rai city. It is the first region on this shelf outside China - and the one we know first-hand, because we buy there ourselves.

How did a Chinese regiment end up growing tea in Thailand?

Mae Salong was settled in the early 1960s by veterans of the Kuomintang 93rd division - soldiers, many of them Yunnanese, who retreated from China through Burma after the civil war and stopped for good in the hills of Chiang Rai. The village they built spoke the Chinese of Yunnan and looked north.

For its first years the mountain lived off the old cash crop of these borderlands, opium poppy. From the 1970s and 80s, Thai royal crop-substitution projects offered the settlers other harvests: tea, coffee, stone fruit. Tea won. The village was renamed Santikhiri, "hill of peace", and gardens climbed the slopes where poppy had grown. The whole story fits inside one human lifetime.

Why does Mae Salong tea taste Taiwanese?

Mae Salong tea tastes Taiwanese because its bushes are: the gardens were planted with cultivars brought over from Taiwan - Jin Xuan (No. 12, the bush behind milk oolong) and Ruan Zhi (No. 17, the soft-stem oolong). So the mountain rolls its leaf into tight pearls and makes red oolong and GABA in the Taiwanese manner.

Altitude does the rest. At 1,200–1,800 metres the nights stay cool in every season, so the leaf grows slowly and comes off the bush thick - and thick leaf holds the aromatics a good oolong is built on.

Tea here is older than these gardens, though. Long before anyone in the north brewed a cup, people fermented the local assam-leaf tea and chewed it - miang, the old leaf of Northern Thailand. The Taiwanese bushes arrived in a land that already knew tea.

Mae Salong on our shelf

Our GABA oolong is grown and fermented in Mae Salong, on old Taiwanese-cultivar bushes, and we buy it directly from the gardens - no importer between the mountain and our counter. On the shelf it goes by GABA Oolong Amber Smoke: fermented pear and mineral sweetness. The smoke in the name is real.

Flying home from Thailand? This is the leaf we put first in our tea souvenirs guide - grown here, hard to find once you leave Asia. And of all the regions we buy from, this one is nearest: same country, a domestic flight and a mountain road away.

Does Thailand grow real pu-erh?

No. In the Chinese system pu-erh is a geographic name - the tea of Yunnan, the way Champagne belongs to Champagne. Northern Thailand has its own fermented assam-leaf teas, miang first among them, but Mae Salong's real strength is different: Taiwanese-cultivar oolong and GABA. For the real thing, look at our pu-erh from Yunnan - cakes from the province the name belongs to.