Choui Fong Tea Plantation

Choui Fong Tea Plantation covers the hillsides above Ban Thert Thai in Mae Chan district, a 40-minute drive from Doi Mae Salong’s main village. Entry is free, the plantation opens 08:30-17:30 daily, and the reason people make the winding drive up is the view from the hilltop café: rows of tea bushes curving along the ridgeline as far as the eye can see.

Choui Fong actually runs two estates. The original, in Mae Fa Luang district at around 1,200 metres altitude, spans over 800,000 square metres but isn’t open to visitors — it’s a working production site. The one everyone photographs is the second estate in Mae Chan district, a 1.6 square kilometre spread of terraced hillside that anyone can walk through for free. There’s no ticket booth and no guided route; you park, wander the paths between the rows, and stop wherever the light looks good.

The Choui Fong Tea Café sits at the top, a 150-seat space built into the slope with glass fronting the tea fields. The menu leans hard into the plantation’s own leaves: hot and cold oolong and green tea, lychee oolong, a grass jelly oolong tea, and a red bean green tea blend, alongside green tea cake, green tea tart, and a green tea croissant. Food options run to Yunnan-style spaghetti and a tuna salad — a nod to the Chinese Yunnanese heritage of nearby Doi Mae Salong, still a Kuomintang-descendant community. Coffee is on the menu too, for anyone who’s had enough tea by the time they arrive.

Insider Tip: Weekday mornings before 10 AM are quietest — this is one of Chiang Rai’s most photographed spots and tour buses start arriving mid-morning. The viewpoint terrace above the café gets crowded fast once they do.

Watch out: The access road climbing Doi Mae Salong has tight switchbacks with limited visibility. Budget more time than the map suggests, especially on a scooter or in the rain.

The tea plantation pairs naturally with Tea Plantation 101, a smaller working estate elsewhere on Doi Mae Salong, for anyone touring the area’s tea country in one trip. Doi Mae Salong itself — a former Kuomintang settlement known for its Yunnanese food and mountain scenery — is worth a night if the drive up is already committed to; see the Doi Mae Salong hub for the rest of the area.