Thailand owes its comparatively early withdrawal from opium cultivation in a commercially relevant scale to its royal family, namely its monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej Rama IX., ruling the country since 1946 and until today.
King Bhumipol, for decades a blessing for his country in many ways, recognized at an early stage that it was useless to fight the opium cultivation and trade, those times being a major part of the locals’ economic basis, only with the adoption of dedicated laws and their police and military enforcement. He realized that it wouldn’t be wise to deprive these people of their economic basis without providing them with a replacement.
In this context of replacing opium cultivation with the farming of other, more beneficial and sustainable cash crops, the higher altitudes of the north-west part of Thailand bordering Burma were found to be particularly suitable for the cultivation of tea. On the initiative of the Royal Development Project, experts from Taiwan were consulted to identify the Taiwanse Oolong tea cultivars most appropriate for the cultivation on the slopes of north-west Thailand’s mountains. Then, these cultivars, the Jin Xuan Oolong Nr. 12 and the Ruan Zhi Oolong Nr. 17 were imported and given to local farmers willing to shift to the cultivation of tea. Many of the people living in the ethnic melting pot North Thailand, originating from regions in China and Tibet, looked back on their own tea culture and tradition, this making the initiative falling on very fertile soil.