Shin chai and kahwa: green tea among the Pashtuns

At a glance

• Among Pashtuns the everyday tea of the Peshawar side is green: qehwa (kahwa), boiled with sugar and crushed cardamom and served from a small pot, with milk added for the variant called sheen da payo. [4, 8, 9]

• Afghans drink both green and black tea, plain or with a touch of cardamom. Green tea is classed as a "cold" drink for summer and black as a "hot" drink for winter. [2]

• Afghanistan has never grown tea in quantity. Every leaf was carried in, from China through Bukhara and Yarkand, and later mostly from India. [1, 2]

• The Qissa Khwani bazaar in Peshawar is named for its storytellers, and its qehwa khanas (tea houses) were where caravan men sat after the city gates shut. [4, 5, 8]

Three teas and what they are called

Peshawar's green tea is qehwa, and the tea house is the qehwa khana. Dawn, reporting from Peshawar, calls it "Sheen Chai (green tea)", and says green tea "is still the most favourite beverage among Pakhtuns". [6] The Express Tribune goes further: green tea, "locally known as qehwa", has "become synonymous with Pakhtun hospitality" and "the national beverage for Pakhtuns". [7] Those are journalists' judgements, not a count, but they match what the tea houses of the old city serve.

The pot is made in a set way. At the Qehwa Khana in Qissa Khwani, the tea maker Muhammad Amir described it to Arab News in 2025: water is heated in a brass samovar, poured into a teapot, boiled again on the stove, and then the leaves, sugar and cardamom go in. [4] Roads & Kingdoms gives the two common kinds: plain qehwa, boiled with sugar and a few crushed cardamoms, and sheen-do-payo, which is qehwa with milk added. [8] The owner of the Mohmand qehwa khana told the news agency APP in 2025 that most customers still prefer the traditional cup, while the milk version is popular at parties and special gatherings. [9]

Black tea is the other everyday tea. The Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on tea, by Daniel Balland and Marcel Bazin, says Afghans drink both, and that green is thought "cold" and black "hot", so green is drunk mostly in summer and black in larger quantities in winter, though many Afghans drink black all year. [2] The entry describes Afghans as a whole, not Pashtuns alone, and its figures come from the 1960s and 1970s. For the food side of the same table, see Pashtun food and the table of hospitality, which quotes Nancy Hatch Dupree on the everyday diet of bread with plenty of sugared tea.

How tea reached the Pashtun lands

Tea is not native to Afghanistan or Pakistan's north-west, and none was ever grown there on any scale. Balland and Bazin write that Afghanistan "does not produce tea". An attempt in the early 1960s to grow it in the Kunar valley failed because the rainfall was not enough. [2]

The drink travelled by trade. The same entry says tea did not spread to western Asia before the 13th century, and that the Mongols may have had a part in it, citing Berthold Laufer. [2] In Afghanistan it spread earlier and faster than in Iran. Alexander Burnes, a British officer travelling to Bukhara in 1831 to 1833, wrote at the court of Kunduz that "nothing is done in this country without tea, which is handed round at all times and hours, and gives a social character to conversation". [1, 2]

Burnes also recorded where the leaf came from. In Bukhara, he wrote, the chief import from the Chinese garrisons at Kashgar and Yarkand was tea: 950 horse-loads, about 200,000 lb, in the year of his visit, "entirely green tea", carried over the Pamirs and down the Oxus valley by merchants of Badakhshan. [1] Burnes adds that little of it went south of the Hindu Kush that year. [1] Balland and Bazin, citing the same pages, say that until India began to export tea, Afghanistan relied mainly on China tea reaching Kabul by way of Bukhara. [2] The two readings differ in emphasis, and Burnes is describing one season.

India then became the main supplier. By the Iranica figures, India's share of Afghanistan's tea imports fell from 77.2 per cent in 1976 to 1977 to 41.4 per cent in 1986 to 1987, while China's, mostly green tea, rose from 10 to 26.2 per cent. [2] The entry also records a Pashtun trading group: in the first half of the 20th century the Hazarbuz, a nomadic sub-tribe of the Mohmand, specialised in importing Indian tea on large caravans that went as far as northern Afghanistan. [2] Before general grocery shops spread, specialist tea shops stood in every major bazaar, and in the late 1970s there were still 89 tea merchants in the old bazaar of Kandahar and 182 in Kabul. [2]

On who first brought black tea, the sources do not agree and none is firm. Ibrahim Zia, a Peshawar historian and author, told Roads & Kingdoms that qehwa "dates back to antiquity, long before British missionaries introduced black tea". [8] That is his statement, and Roads & Kingdoms itself says "not much is known about origins of green tea here". [8]

Qissa Khwani and the tea houses

Peshawar was where the caravan road from Central Asia met the roads of India, and the old city's tea houses grew up around that traffic. Qissa Khwani, "the storytellers' bazaar", starts at the arched Kabuli Gate, one of the walled city's 16 gates. [8] Dawn, reporting for AFP in 2020, says that caravans of wandering traders often stayed the night after the gates were sealed at dusk, and that in the evenings the merchants heard storytellers tell of the dangers of the road, news of wars and local lore. [5]

The tea house owners describe the same scene. Fazl Rehman, who runs the Qehwa Khana, told Arab News that caravans from India and Afghanistan arrived just before the gates were locked, camped nearby and sat over qehwa into the early hours listening to travelling storytellers. In the morning, after the call to prayer, the gates opened and the caravans moved on to Lahore and Amritsar. The floor of the hall used to be covered with grass or dry pine needles, he said, which his family brought from their village in Mohmand country. [4] People in the city told Dawn that the tea houses were also guest houses for travellers who stayed the night, and cafés where intellectuals, poets, writers and officials argued over a cup of tea. The one old double-storey house still standing there had a brewing room downstairs and about 20 beds upstairs, rented for Rs50 to Rs80 a night. [6]

What the storytellers gave their listeners went beyond entertainment. Khwaja Safar Ali, 75 in 2020, remembered sitting with the other boys in the evening: "They would tell us about Kabul, the USSR [and] Uzbekistan. We learned about these countries through them." [5] Ali Awais Qarni, a University of Peshawar researcher, called the storytellers "the communication tools of that time", and the last of Peshawar's storytellers, who died aged 86 in autumn 2020, had run a small hotel where caravan men heard stories "for a few pennies" over green tea. [5] The same lanes are tied to a harder memory: a white marble monument stands in the street for those killed in April 1930, when British troops opened fire on protesters (see Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement). [8, 9]

The tea houses faded in stages. Zia told Dawn they were busy until the early 1980s, when insecurity gripped the city. [6] Rehman told Roads & Kingdoms that the bazaar used to have eight such stalls and by 2015 had two, and that "as long as the city was centre of trade with Afghanistan, tea stalls prospered"; he dated the decline to the arrival of refugees after the Soviet invasion of 1979. [8] Bomb attacks followed. Zarjan Khan, who ran the double-storey house, said the explosion on 29 September 2013 killed 41 people and injured more than 100, and that it damaged his tea house, which he rebuilt "in its original shape". [6] Costs hurt too: in the Express Tribune's report, a stall owner from Mohmand said he charged Rs12 for a pot, and that cardamom had risen from Rs180 to Rs2,600 a kilo. [7] In 2025 a pot for two cost about Rs50. [4]

Tea for the guest and in the hujra

Tea is the first thing offered. Arab News says qehwa is often served to guests as a sign of respect. [4] In the village the same cup is poured in the hujra, the men's guest house. That article, following Fredrik Barth's account of Swat, records that at half past three or four the prominent men and their followers gathered in the hujra for tea boiled with milk and sugar, before the evening talk began. So the hujra of Swat served milk tea, while the city tea houses of Peshawar serve green. In Iranica's account, tea comes after meals and between them, at home, on a visit, at work and while travelling, and "bargaining can scarcely proceed in the bazaar without the accompaniment of tea". [2]

Helen Saberi, a British writer who lived in Afghanistan for nine years from 1971, describes the Afghan guest's welcome: he is seated in the place of honour on cushions and offered tea before anything else, and the glass is kept filled until the guest turns it over to show he has had enough. [3] Hospitality could be a matter of means. Iranica adds that in the mid-20th century people in the most remote mountain areas still thought tea a luxury, served mainly to honoured guests. [2]

Sugar, nuql and the first sweet cup

Sugar is part of the courtesy. Balland and Bazin describe the Afghan way: the drinking bowl is rinsed with a little tea, which is poured away, then a good quantity of granulated sugar (bura) goes in and the tea is poured on it. As the sugar is not topped up, the first bowl is very sweet (chay-e shirin) and later ones turn bitter (chay-e talkh). [2] Saberi says the same: the first cup comes with a great deal of sugar, "the more sugar, the more honour", and the second without. [3] Poorer people drink their tea plain, Iranica notes. [2]

Sugar can also be eaten between sips. Iranica says the lump-in-the-mouth method (qand-pahlu) is used in Afghanistan only with sweets or with sugar-coated almonds, chickpeas or apricot kernels, called noql in Iranica's spelling (nuql). [2] Saberi describes people who dip lumps of qand in the tea and hold them in the mouth as they drink, and says that in winter ghur, which she calls a lump sugar made from cane, is served for its warming properties. [3] At the Qehwa Khana in Qissa Khwani, by contrast, the sugar goes into the pot with the leaves and cardamom. [4]