Hong Kong matcha brand stirs up history by highlighting the tea’s Chinese roots
Hong Kong bar owner Gavin Yeung founded matcha brand Celadon after being ‘floored’ by its long history in China before reaching Japan
It started with his discovery of matcha as a serene way to start the day. He initially saw whisking the tea as a grounding practice amid the chaos of the city.
But for Yeung, whose career has revolved around reviving long-lost traditions, it became an obsession.
For many tea drinkers, matcha – a powder with centuries of discipline, craft and spirituality behind it – is synonymous with Japan. But few realise that China is where it actually originated.
That misunderstanding is born from the fact that Japan spent the better part of 1,000 years refining matcha into an art form before making it a global cultural export, while China’s matcha history has largely faded into obscurity. Generations of consumers learned to associate matcha exclusively with Japanese aesthetics, grading systems and tea ceremonies.
“Matcha today is viewed through an exclusively Japanese lens,” Yeung says. “But once I started doing more research and realised how much history there is where I’m from, I was floored.”