Exactly when and where Thai Tea — or Cha Yen — was invented is unknown, but it’s said to have gained popularity during the reign of Rama VI in the early 1900s. But it wasn’t until military dictator Plaek Phiboonsongkram suggested adding milk that it gained its popularity outside the Siam borders.
Today, the orange milk tea drink is recognized around the world as a staple to try when you come to Thailand. And with time, adaptations such as adding tapioca pearls or grass jelly have become increasingly popular. Beyond the drink itself, the flavor is also very commonly used in sweet treats and desserts.
Thai tea has essentially become a staple flavor rather than just one signature drink, but how did we get here?
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Thailand’s own tea story starts, like so much else, with China. Centuries of trade between the two carried tea south across the border, brought by the Chinese who settled around the southern trading ports — Chonburi, Rayong — and in the old capital of Ayutthaya. But what they drank was oolong, served the Chinese way: hot.
And that’s roughly where the Thai people’s enthusiasm stalled. Hot tea has limited appeal when the air outside is just as hot, and as an imported good it was expensive. So for a long stretch, tea stayed mostly in the hands of Chinese immigrants and merchants rather than the average Thai person. Only with time did Thai growers begin producing their own, slowly reshaping the hot Chinese drink into something else.
It’s easy to think that the Chinese were the ones to introduce Thais to tea altogether, but truth is, Thais were eating tea long before they drank it.
Up in the northern hills, tea leaves were steamed and worked into miang — a chewable paste traditionally mixed with salt, oil, garlic, pork fat and dried fish. The paste is rolled into balls, and eaten.
Although miang is mostly thought of as Thai today — or at least northern Thai — miang originally stems from hill tribes who’ve lived in the mountains for centuries, way before borders were drawn.
Coming back to when Thailand started developing its own ways to drink tea — the start of it is actually not very well documented. The origins of what we call Thai Tea today are genuinely quite murky. But one way to map out a general timeline is by looking at the ingredients: sweetened condensed milk and crushed ice — neither native to Thailand.
Thailand didn’t have its first ice factory till the early 1900s, and sweetened milk was introduced to the country roughly by the 1890s. Meaning Thai Tea, the way we drink it today, is estimated to be just less than 100 years old, if even that.
Tellingly, it has little to do with the oolong tea the Chinese brought. Thai tea is black, brewed strong — not unlike the tea still drunk in Burma, except that Thais take it cold. Adding milk isn’t a Chinese habit either, but a western one. Meaning despite the history of Chinese tea, Thai tea most likely did not stem from that — but rather from western influence and a way to create a staple Thai drink.
WHAT IS THAI TEA?
Real Thai Tea is a native, red-leafed tea spiced with star anise, brewed strong and topped with evaporated milk — which should make it a reddish-brown color and not the famous orange. Despite this, the drink is mostly recognized by the bright orange color. So where does it come from?
That famous neon-orange glow is just food coloring. A way of making Thai Tea stand out against other milk teas around the world. And thanks largely to the spread of Thai restaurants abroad, this unique-looking drink is now one of the first things foreigners meet when they sit down for Thai food.
Reality is, tea has never ruled the Thai drink market the way it does elsewhere. Coca-Cola, for instance, has eaten into it way further. However, tea seems to keep finding new forms to attract the Thai people; green tea has lately become a real growth story of the beverage aisle, among others. One thing these new ways of drinking tea have in common, however, is that they’re served cold.
Thai people may never have taken to the Chinese way of drinking tea, but they’ve embraced the leaf all the same — right down to growing their own. Thailand is no major producer or exporter, yet it’s been cultivating tea for over 60 years, up in the cool northern mountains.
The district of Doi Mae Salong is prized for its oolong, grown by descendants of Chinese Kuomintang soldiers who were welcomed into the north as a buffer against Mao’s advancing armies. For black tea, the Raming Tea Company has a loyal following. And in 1995, Taiwan introduced better seedlings and the training to raise yields — plants later propagated in Thailand itself and handed out to those same KMT villages.
HOW IT’S MADE
Making Cha Yen is not just dipping tea leaves into hot water — it takes ritual to acquire the rich flavor so many around the world love. The dark Thai tea powder is brewed traditionally through a Thai cloth filter shaped like a long sock.
According to local brewers, much of that flavor comes from the heat itself: the water has to be boiling hot and steaming to really bring the flavor out.
Sugar and sweetened condensed milk go in while it’s still hot, and the mixture is then poured over a tall glass of crushed ice. The finishing move is a slow float of evaporated milk across the top: that pale swirl bleeding down into the orange is the drink’s signature, and half the reason it photographs so well.
Traditionally, the finished drink wasn’t served in the plastic cup we see today, but in a clear plastic bag — tied off with a rubber band and handed over with a straw, ready to carry away.
THE CHA FAMILY
The word Cha is simply Thai for tea. Thai milk tea goes by Cha Nom Yen — literally tea milk cold — or just Cha Yen, cold tea. Famous as it is, it’s really just one of many ways to drink Thai tea.
There’s Cha Dam Yen, the same tea without the milk (dam meaning black), and Cha Manao, cut with lemon instead (manao being Thai for lemon) — essentially Cha Dam Yen with lemon.
All of them can be served hot, but cold is almost always the preference. And like other milk teas, they take modern add-ons too: tapioca pearls, grass jelly and the rest.
THAI TEA TODAY
As Cha Yen spread across the globe, the orange drink stopped being only a drink and gained recognition as a flavor in its own right. It now turns up in ice cream, cakes, cookies and custards, to name a few — and in Thailand it sits right alongside standard flavors like chocolate and vanilla. Thai tea has, in other words, become its own flavor category, not necessarily tied to the drink itself.
For a drink that feels timeless — poured on every street corner, recognized half a world away — Thai tea is remarkably new. What started as an expensive import few Thais bothered with became, in under a century, one of the most Thai things there is.
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