An old black cat slept snugly in its chair in the Yunnan-themed, street-facing restaurant on Mae Salong’s main road. It was oblivious to the gentle exhortations of two middle-aged women, who asked it to make way for three hungry travellers, excited about the halal fare served there. Beneath a picture of the Kaaba, photos of tantalising soups, noodles, and salads were hung.The food was not quite Thai, not quite Burmese, certainly Yunnan-inspired, yet very familiar to the three of us. The neighbouring shop played Chinese pop music, and the signs around us were written in English, Thai and Chinese. On the street outside the restaurant, two bystanders spoke in accented Thai, telling us the cat was not going to move, so we ought to find another table.We had driven two hours from Chiang Dao in northern Thailand in search of tea, supposedly the Assamica variety, grown in the region since the 1980s. My Thai-Australian friends had been here before and they remembered the road being rougher than the smooth, tarred highway we were on.I, on the other hand, kept marvelling at the landscape, which reminded me of Northeast India. “We could be driving anywhere between Nagaland and upper Assam, you know,” I repeated.Credit: Sanjay BarboraMy friends had sportingly gone along with my harebrained idea of seeking out Assam tea in unexpected places, a project that the Swedish anthropologist Bengt Karlsson is earnestly pursuing.My purpose in pursuing the Assam tea bush was personal, as my father devoted his life to studying the plant and spreading it across Asia and Africa in the 20th century. His death on March 27, 2025, left me wishing I had learned more about his conviction that the tea bush could help address poverty in the global South.Coming to Mae Salong felt like a secular pilgrimage in memory of a man who firmly believed that science and rationality should underpin civic life.Tea is Mae Salong’s signature drink and local celebrity. It is often served free of charge in most restaurants and hotels as a welcome drink. “Number 17 is the one everyone likes, but you should try a newer one,” the auntie at the Yunnan restaurant insisted as we found a different table, away from the sleeping cat from the previous afternoon.She poured us cups of amber liquid, its fragrance reaching our nostrils even before the cups were set in front of us. “We haven’t yet started packaging it,” she said, pointing to the big bag of oolong tea on the floor of her restaurant.Our food arrived soon, and even the sight of Shan noodles and Yunnan beef with potatoes could not keep us from asking for more tea. It was the first of many cups we would be served across town. People would come alive whenever we showed interest in their array of tea packets.My friend, the much-admired theatre personality Pongjit “Jon” Saphakhun, always slipped in a question about Assam tea during these encounters. This prompted further gestures of interest from our hosts, who confirmed they had once grown the Assam variety, but most of the tea they now sold was oolong, much sought after in Taiwan.Between tea and Taiwan, Mae Salong was a repository of extraordinary stories that helped visitors make sense of the town’s tumultuous past. In fact, the town was emblematic of the layered history of conflict and cooperation that transformed a 20th-century frontier town with polyphonic identities into a Thai border town with historical, economic, and political ties to the outside world, ties that sit awkwardly with all forms of nationalism in Southeast Asia.Chinese Martyrs Memorial, Mae Salong. Credit: Sanjay BarboraTaiwan in ThailandMae Salong is also known by its official Thai name, Santikhiri. Situated in the highlands along the Burma/Myanmar-Thailand-Laos border, near China’s Yunnan province, the small town has a fascinating history of settlement. A polyglot place, it became home to various indigenous hill communities, such as the Akha, Hmong, and Lisu, as well as a sizeable number of Chinese communities from Yunnan.The Yunnan Chinese belong to different religious groups, mainly Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist. In the 1950s, their ancestors established a small village in the highlands after the Chinese civil war, and they were all supporters of the nationalist Kuomintang. A section of the Kuomintang army refused to surrender to the Communists after the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.The 93rd Division, led by General Li Mi of the Kuomintang, continued to launch attacks against the Communists in Yunnan, but, given the vagaries of protracted warfare, it was left isolated from the main body of the nationalist army, which had moved to Taiwan along with General Chiang Kai-shek. The soldiers of the division first tried to negotiate a deal for refuge as political exiles with the newly independent Burmese government.However, the Burmese government, wary of jeopardising its relationship with the Communist government in Beijing, attacked the Kuomintang division. Under these trying circumstances, the Chinese nationalists found themselves in the region that now constitutes the Myanmar-Thailand-Laos borderlands.The region had been lightly administered by colonial Britain, as well as by Asian states such as Siam (renamed Thailand in 1939) and China. Following the Second World War and the Chinese Civil War, it became a refuge for a wide range of actors.The indigenous communities that lived here were smaller and more egalitarian, with fewer ties to the global trade and cultural assimilation that characterised Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Still, their homelands were carved up and shaped by larger historical forces, not always within their control.The period between 1950 and 1970 was a pivotal era in the region. Decolonisation of Asian (and African) countries was underway as the Cold War expanded across the world. British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish powers were withdrawing from their colonies, leaving behind lands where several ethnic groups vied with their neighbours for control. They adopted various ideologies and strategies to establish their control over the territories they sought to govern.When the Kuomintang soldiers were pushed out of Myanmar, they moved to the area around Mae Salong. There, they attempted to regroup and re-establish contact with the main force that had consolidated its base in Taiwan. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the Thai government faced a Communist-inspired insurgency that the Thai military, with help from the Central Intelligence Agency, brutally crushed.Members of the 93rd Division were enlisted in the north because they had a long history of fighting Communist guerrillas during the Chinese Civil War. In return, the Chinese soldiers and their families were granted Thai citizenship.Elements of Thai and Chinese nationalism coexist in Mae Salong. Buddhist temples dot the hilltops, while an elegant, spare mosque sits midway up a hill overlooking the town. References to the Kuomintang are impossible to miss, with the walls of restaurants and homes adorned with elaborate murals and artworks celebrating the movement’s figures. General Chiang Kai-shek figures prominently among them, as do ordinary soldiers and supporters.Along the lower part of town, the highway leads to an elaborate memorial to the fallen Kuomintang soldiers, where the Thai and Taiwanese flags are displayed in the main spirit hall. The memorial proudly commemorates the wars – both victories and defeats – fought by the 93rd Division.Rooms in the complex are dedicated to different aspects of the Chinese soldiers’ political journey and record the contributions of the Taiwan government, as well as those of a host of other entities that helped establish small-scale business enterprises in Mae Salong.Hall of remembrance, Martyrs Memorial, Credit: Sanjay BarboraThe beauty of teaRoosters begin crowing early in the morning in Mae Salong. Like the cats, they are everywhere and are treated with good humour by those around them. Both cats and roosters keep to their lane and are unlikely to be seen darting across streets or running through people’s homes.I woke to a particularly raucous specimen who decided to announce the arrival of sunrise around 4.30 in the morning. The sun had just begun to bathe the valley outside my window in light. Beyond the rooster’s loud cries stretched vast acres of tea, neatly planted in rows. From my table on the balcony, I watched the tea bushes, separated from the bamboo thickets, as I waited for my tea and toast, the earliest breakfast I had had in a while.The waiter smiled and said something in Burmese, and seeing my confusion, shook his head and said something to the two women with thanaka paste on their cheeks. All three began to apologise and giggle at once. The early-morning tea was exquisite.The town had several small kiosks, tea rooms, and tea-processing factories overlooking the spectacular hill slopes, each serving hot and iced teas, along with the ubiquitous premium coffee for which Thailand is becoming famous. The hills that ringed the town were dotted with quirky establishments, including one with four fountains pouring water through teapots.July was a lean tourist season, so most waiters and servers at these establishments were happy to chat with inquisitive visitors about the town's fortunes and tea. The moment Jon mentioned my interest in Assam tea, or that I was trying to follow in my father’s footsteps, our hosts would pull out photographs and point to packets labelled “Forest Tea” to show that the Assamica variety of Camellia sinensis was still around.It had been brought to the area in the 1980s, around the time the Kuomintang veterans and their families were granted Thai citizenship. In 2009, sociologist Ko-lin Chin wrote that the Kuomintang had begun partnering with ethnic warlords in northern Myanmar. As a result, it is alleged that some Chinese soldiers and ethnic warlords encouraged indigenous farmers to cultivate opium, which they taxed and transported across the region known as the Golden Triangle.My father strongly believed that the tea plant grown in Assam could help alleviate poverty in the global South. As he aged, he would wait patiently for me to finish my rant about the terrible working conditions on the tea plantations, then softly add that the plant itself was a thing of beauty and wonder.I could almost sense his joy at being invited by the government to northern Thailand, and that too, for as noble an enterprise as replacing opium with tea. He spent a short time in the region, arranging the transfer of tea clones and technology, but the Assamica variety did not become the star he had hoped it would be.A wall on the way to the Veterans Village. Credit: Sanjay BarboraIn the 1990s, Assam tea was replaced by oolong varieties from mainland China. This coincided with the renewal of ties between Taiwan and the Chinese community in Mae Salong.One of the main rooms in the memorial dedicated to martyrs contained a detailed record of the contributions of the Chinese Association for Relief and Ensuing Services and the Free China Relief Association. It noted that CARES and FCRA had helped re-establish connections between the community and their comrades in Taiwan, including support for livelihood options. Growing tea and livestock and providing scholarships for young people to study in Taiwan were integral to this effort.“There are many young people who get scholarships and leave for Taiwan,” said Achin, a community historian and tea taster, whom we met at Plantation 101, where she worked. She pointed out the teas we were going to drink and went about the ceremonial work with practised ease. Her grandfather was a veteran, and she said she had been working at the tea-tasting counter for several years.Few of the youth came back, she said. Taiwan offered them better work and opportunities, so they did not want to return to a life of ennui in the mountains of northern Thailand. “I often felt like we were left behind when I was younger,” she said to Jon, but explained that she felt more aligned with her Chinese heritage and Thai citizenship these days.Achin spoke about the difficulties faced by the early Chinese community as they settled on the hill slopes around Mae Salong. Ordinary Thai people from the lowlands were afraid to travel up, and the Chinese feared what might happen if they engaged with the lowland communities, having had a bad experience in northern Burma.The indigenous people of the region, wedged between the lowland Thai and the armed Chinese soldiers, chose to side with the latter. However, significant numbers of them supported the Communist Party of Thailand’s armed insurgents.Assam tea, therefore, was the result of a series of complex calculations and negotiations among the various actors, except perhaps the Communist Party of Thailand. Even today, Achin explained, indigenous Akha and Hmong villagers continued to grow the Assamica variety in their fields. Many of these teas were left unpruned and marketed as “Forest Black Tea” across town.These teas were bolder in flavour, less delicate than the oolongs usually offered to visitors at tea-tasting sessions. However, they were not marketed as green teas. “Green tea is lazy tea,” Achin said, chuckling, as she poured us another glass of delicate oolong from one of the larger factories in town. Jon concurred, recounting her earliest memories of drinking stronger teas branded “Three Horses Tea” across Thailand.Our conversations with Achin were in fluent Thai, though she reminded us that she spoke Chinese at home. “The moment we step out, we are Thai,” she said with a smile.She spoke about the difficulties the Taiwan connection posed for young students in Mae Salong. Her generation and those growing up now had to learn Thai in government and private schools during the day, as the Thai state sought to establish cultural control over the place and its people. By evening, the Taiwanese government’s financial aid required students to learn Chinese as well, so they had to attend extra classes at night.This explained a puzzle for my friends and me. We were confused by the sight of schoolchildren waiting for their parents to pick them up at 7pm outside the Baptist School the previous evening. They were learning Chinese so that their passage to Taiwan might be a little easier if they chose to apply for a scholarship to leave Mae Salong.A photo point. Credit: Sanjay BarboraA heavy priceThe news of devastating landslides in Mon district, Nagaland, and once-in-a-lifetime floods in upper Assam reached me as I wrote the concluding paragraphs of this travel diary. Videos of panicked people, livestock, and wildlife, desperate for help amid the raging brown waters cascading down the mountains, reminded me of the fragility of the places we call home.Short videos, shared thousands of times, showed entire mountains cave in to become mudslides; frightened pythons drowning in floodwaters and struggling to enter through windows, behind which terrified people waited for both water and snake to enter; and people perched on treetops as the sea of water raced towards an already swollen Brahmaputra and its tributaries.I read my friend, geologist Sarat Phukan’s evocative piece, in which he described the flood’s aftermath as “a new sky over an old, bruised valley”. He painstakingly explained that illegal mining, earth cutting, and the construction of four-laned highways contributed to the flood. Even though it is still early, news from back home confirmed that many of my friends and family have lost their livelihoods, homes, and livestock and may not recover from this devastation in their lifetime.It reminded me of conversations with my friends, Jon and Richard, as we sat and ate lunch by the Kok River in Thaton on our way down from Mae Salong. I was intrigued by the intensive cultivation of the hillsides, both at Mae Salong and on the way back to Chiang Dao. What looked like pristine forests were a patchwork of agricultural enterprise. Large conglomerates had persuaded farmers to grow crops for the market, and every inch of hillside had been planted.This growth required more houses, so local riverbeds were mined for sand and pebbles. More dams on the Mekong to supply electricity for industries in Thailand had also compounded the problem. Jon and the waitress talked about the 2024 flooding of the Kok River. The waitress pointed to a building on the opposite side and said the water had risen to the second floor. Her own restaurant had been swept away, and we were sitting in the new section. Ironically, the song playing as we ate was about the romance associated with the Kok River.Our fates in Northeast India and northern Thailand are not so different after all. The states that govern us see our territories as fallow land, devoid of enterprising people, associations, and conglomerations that can add economic value. Each new group that comes to seek shelter from political storms is encouraged to do more to prove it belongs to the land. The authorities exact a heavy price from the land and its people.When disasters occur, as they did in northern Thailand (and Laos) in 2024 and in eastern Assam, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh this year, the authorities are often slower to respond than our neighbours and communities that rally around namghors, mosques, churches, temples, and secular institutions such as schools and colleges.I think my father was among those who went to persuade, but not for a profiteer’s motive. In the last years of his life, he had long conversations with my partner about changes in the weather and their implications for our region. She remembers how accurately he would predict rain after a spell of humid summer days.During my brief time in northern Thailand, I tried to see the land through his eyes. He was an agronomist, but he was also curious about people and their histories. Would he have felt bad that his beloved Assam tea had given way to more delicate and marketable oolongs from China? I think not; he would have found his way to the Akha village below our hotel to advise the growers on the right balance of sun and shade for a prolonged harvest.Maybe I should have asked him more about his work when I was younger, but then I would not have made this pilgrimage to Mae Salong.Some tragedies happen in an instant, yet they build up slowly. Identities and landscapes usually take generations to take shape, shaped by different forms of pressure at various moments. Plants, people, and politics go on to make places what they are. A few days in Mae Salong is hardly enough to make sense of the momentous changes the borderland town has witnessed over seven decades.However, pilgrimages allow us to hope for better futures, even after we return home. As we wrestled with state politics and people’s memories and made our way down from the town’s only mosque, Jon pointed excitedly to a rainbow above us. “Look, in memory of your father! There is hope, darling,” she said with childlike glee.Indeed, there is.Sanjay Barbora teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.