--- title: 'Chaikhana and piala: tea in Central Asia' url: 'https://howtotea.me/traditions/middle-east-and-central-asia/chaikhana' markdown: 'https://howtotea.me/traditions/middle-east-and-central-asia/chaikhana.md' lang: en date: '2026-10-25' description: 'Central Asian tea: green kok-choy, qaytarish pour-backs, the half-filled piala, the chaikhana, shir-choy of the Pamirs and Soviet pakhtagul porcelain.' --- # Chaikhana and piala: tea in Central Asia Editors · October 25, 2026 · 9 min read In Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan people drink Chinese [green tea](https://howtotea.me/teas/green) from a handleless piala. The brew is poured back and forth three times, and a guest gets a third or half a bowl. Tea became a mass drink only in the later 19th century. ![A teapot and two piala bowls with a cotton pattern, a third full, and dried apricots](https://howtotea.me/images/c/o/v/e/r/cover-26f1b2d3.webp) Illustration Chaikhana and piala Tea: green: Uzbek koʻk choy, Tajik choyi kabud, Turkmen gök çaý Brewing: boiling water, 5–6 minutes under a towel, qaytarish three times Vessels: porcelain teapot (choynak) and a handleless piala Pour: a third to a half, less for a more honored guest Mass drink: cities from the later 19th c., Tajik highlands in the 20th c. Uzbek imports: 24,561 t from China in 11 months of 2024 (81% of the total) **100°**, boiling water **1 tsp**, per 500–600 ml **5–6**, minutes under a towel A teahouse in the shade of trees, a host and a guest on a raised platform. The host pours a bowl, tips it back into the pot, then does it again. It looks like a custom as old as the Silk Road. In fact, people here have drunk tea widely for only about a century and a half: before the mid-19th century it was a drink of the court and the elite. ## How tea reached Central Asia The first report comes from the German traveler Adam Olearius. In 1630s Isfahan he saw a teahouse, "Tzai Chattai Chane", and wrote that "Uzbek Tatars" brought tea to Persia from China. In the early 18th century the Italian F. Benevenni noted that people in Bukhara drank sweet tea and that it was a drink of the nobility. In 1774 a captive, F. Efremov, put the word *chay* into his glossary of Bukharan words. According to the ethnographer Sergei Abashin, tea spread in two stages. First the fashion reached the elite through the western Mongols, Dzungars and Kalmyks, and tea was taken with milk and fat. Then migrants from Eastern Turkestan carried it into the villages, where people drank it without animal products. Bukhara's nobility was already drinking tea in the 18th century. Other cities followed in the later 19th century, lowland villages by its end, the Tajik highlands in the 20th. In the Khuf valley of the Pamirs, a 1924 record says tea was only then entering everyday life. The supply route shifted too. Until 1864 tea came from China through Kashgar and Kuldja. The uprising in Eastern Turkestan cut the road, and from the 1860s Indian merchants took over the market, selling tea on credit for up to two years. The trip from Bukhara to Kabul took 27 days. In 1878–1879 Bukhara drank green Indian tea: unsweetened it was called *talkh*, sweetened *chay-shirin*. ## The chaikhana: a men's club by the mosque The chaikhana (*choyxona* in Uzbek, *choykhona* in Tajik) stands under trees by an irrigation channel or a pond. In summer people sit outside, in winter they move indoors. Guests leave their shoes at the threshold and settle on the *soʻri*, a wooden platform with quilts around a low table. The menu is short: plov, samsa, shurpa, manti, kebab, halva, green and [black tea](https://howtotea.me/teas/black). No alcohol. In an old Tashkent chaikhana, water was drawn from the channel and left to settle in a clay jar sunk into the ground. The [samovar](https://howtotea.me/teaware/by-region/europe-and-russia/samovar), the "head" of the teahouse, heated a whole row of teapots and warmed the room in winter. Samovars, usually Tula-made and coal-fired, reached Bukhara in the 1830s; before that, water was boiled in a copper ewer, the *qumgʻon*. The chaikhana was a male space. A woman walking in was historically considered improper, and women kept their own circle at home. The men's circle was called the *gap*: friends or colleagues take turns treating each other, most often to plov, sometimes from a shared purse. In the 1920s and 1930s the state moved in. The "red chaikhana" was meant to teach Marxism and rally people for collectivization and cotton monoculture, and by 1934 there were more than 3,000 of them. In 1928 Komsomol members complained that the books sent to them hung from the ceiling on ropes, while the crowds came for donkey races and dutar contests. ## Kok-choy and qaytarish: how it is brewed Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan drink mostly Chinese green tea. Black tea (*qora choy*) has historically kept a following in Tashkent and in western Turkmenistan, where people take it with camel milk. In the first 11 months of 2024 Uzbekistan imported 30,204 t of tea, 24,561 t (81.31%) of it from China, and 99.13% of the Chinese tea was green. Zhejiang is the largest supplier. This is large-leaf export tea such as gunpowder grades 9501 and 9502, or chunmee: it keeps well and stands up to boiling water and many refills. The method is the same everywhere, but the details vary. Uzbek kok-choy Rinse the pot with boiling water. Add tea: a teaspoon for a 500–600 ml pot, or a spoon per bowl plus one for the pot. Pour on boiling water (212°F), cover with a towel and wait 5–6 minutes. Then do qaytarish: fill a bowl and pour it back, three times in all. Pour a little at a time and keep topping up. There is also a stepwise method. Fill the pot a quarter full, keep it over low heat for 2–3 minutes, add two more quarters, wait 5 minutes, then fill to the top. After gaytarmak, Turkmens set the pot aside with the words *demini alsyn*, "let it breathe". Sources disagree on how many times to pour back: three for most, "two or three" in Samarkand, and one tourist portal suggests rinsing three times and serving the fourth pour in a clean bowl. ## The piala and its etiquette The piala is a hemispherical [bowl](https://howtotea.me/teaware/brewing-vessels/cups) without a handle. A Rishtan piala holds about 150 ml, a factory "pakhta" bowl is 10.5–11 cm across, and a teapot for two to six people runs from 0.5 to 1.3 l. Next to it sits the *käse* or *kosa*, a larger bowl, and among Turkmens the first käse goes to the host. The rules are simple. The host or the youngest at the table pours; a guest does not. You hold the bowl from below, by the foot, and pass it with the right hand, the left pressed to the chest. A partly filled bowl is a sign of respect: the more honored the guest, the less tea in it. Sources say half a bowl, a third, or "one or two sips". The host often pours the first bowl for himself to test the brew, and in Tajikistan the gesture also shows the tea is good. Bowls get topped up as they empty, and a guest who has had enough covers the bowl with a palm. A saying counts three bowls: the first is *loy* ("clay", cloudy), the second *moy* ("butter"), the third *choy*. ## Shir-choy on the plains and in the mountains Alongside green tea there is a salty milk tea, which Uzbeks and Tajiks call *shir-choy*. In the 19th century they boiled it in a cauldron with salt, milk, kaymak or ghee, sometimes with mutton fat, put cracklings into the bowls and crumbled flatbread in. Quince twigs, rose hips, cloves, cinnamon or crushed walnuts might go into the water. A Soviet cookbook gives a recipe for a 200 ml serving: boil 2 g of green tea for 5 minutes, add 150 ml of milk, bring to a boil, salt it and add 5 g of butter. Flatbread comes on the side. Abashin ties shir-choy to the first, Mongol-elite wave: Bukharan townspeople and the Khivan khan drank it in the early 19th century. In the Zeravshan valley and Kashkadarya people made it in autumn and winter. Opinions split on the Fergana valley: the Nalivkins recorded it among nomadic Uzbeks, while Gubaeva says the valley's native inhabitants did not drink it. In the Pamirs it became an ethnic marker of the Gorno-Badakhshan people. According to L. F. Monogarova, they serve it to guests and eat it daily, sometimes three times a day. The geographer A. Dörre, who surveyed the village of Zong in 2018, writes that bread dipped in salty tea with milk and butter is one of the main dishes of poorer households there, while black tea and rice were historically luxuries. Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Uyghurs have their own [steppe milk tea](https://howtotea.me/traditions/middle-east-and-central-asia/steppe). ## Pakhtagul: whose pattern is it? Chinese porcelain came along the Silk Road, and the local word *chinni* means "Chinese". From the mid-19th century Russian factories took over the market. By the end of the century up to 70% of the Kuznetsov partnership's output went to the Asian part of the empire: bowls with floral cartouches on a crimson ground, and plov sets. Kuznetsov bought the Gardner factory in 1892. The blue-and-white bowl with cotton bolls is Soviet too. The art historian Akbar Hakimov places the pattern in the propaganda porcelain of the 1930s and 1940s, when cotton was called the white gold of Uzbekistan. The Tashkent Porcelain Factory, the first in Central Asia, was founded in 1953, though UzDaily gives 1952. Craftsmen from four factories set it up: Leningrad, Dulevo, Korosten and Pervomaisk. The painter Tursunali Kuziev credits the canonical stylization to the artist Rauf Aripjanov (1961). The factory mark is the Anka bird. The green "Chinar" series was dropped because party leaders saw a reference to Islam in the color. After the 1990s many factories outside Uzbekistan began making "pakhtagul". Old Tashkent porcelain is dated by its marks: green "Ташкент" 1955–1958, "Тошкент" 1959–1963, cotton marks 1967–1973. ## What is proven and what is myth "Tea has been drunk here since antiquity" is wrong: before the 19th century it was a drink of the elite. The claim that Turkmens drank tea as early as the 12th and 13th centuries finds no support in its source. Just as stubborn is the myth that hot tea cools you down in the heat. In a University of Ottawa experiment (2012, nine men, 75 minutes of cycling at 23.6 °C), drinking 50 °C water lowered heat storage more than cool water, but only when sweat could evaporate freely. Applying that to a dry Central Asian summer is the compiler's inference, not the study's. ## Common questions Why is a guest in Central Asia given a half-filled bowl? A partly filled piala means the host wants to keep topping it up and sit longer. A full bowl is a hint that it is time to leave. Sources disagree on how much to pour: half, a third, or one or two sips. A guest who has had enough covers the bowl with a palm. What is qaytarish and why pour the tea back three times? It means pouring the brew from the pot into a bowl and back again. This mixes the infusion and evens out the strength in the pot. Three times is usual, though one Samarkand source says "two or three". Turkmens do the same and call it gaytarmak. Is pakhtagul an ancient Uzbek pattern? No. The cotton boll motif appeared in the 1930s and 1940s on propaganda porcelain, and the canonical blue-and-white stylization is credited to the painter Rauf Aripjanov (1961). The first Central Asian porcelain factory opened in Tashkent in 1953. --- ## Navigation - Parent: [Tea in the Middle East and Central Asia](https://howtotea.me/traditions/middle-east-and-central-asia.md) - Previous: [Atai: mint green tea of the Maghreb](https://howtotea.me/traditions/middle-east-and-central-asia/atai.md) - Next: [Steppe milk tea: cauldron, brick, salt and butter](https://howtotea.me/traditions/middle-east-and-central-asia/steppe.md)